On careless whispers

You versus the guy everyone told you to worry about

“Hey, it’s Brian!”

There was a point, in the midst of my recent reporting on a wild little drama in the mystery writing world, where the possibility briefly arose that I had stumbled into a #MeToo scoop. It ultimately turned out not to be, which I'm glad about for a variety of reasons; for those wondering about the misconduct that wasn’t, suffice to say that the accusation was both secondhand and unverifiable, the alleged behavior — if it even happened — was not criminal, and a lot of unnecessary confusion would be spared if people could be a tad more careful about how they throw around the word "groping." 

But this is not a post about words. It is a post about whispers.

The whisper network! Remember that? It was huge in 2017. It was our secret defense, our greatest weapon, barely audible, infinitely powerful. The whisper network was how women stayed safe, and if you weren't one of the whisperers, well, look out, because you were probably being whispered about. The whisper network is gossip, yes, but it's gossip you can feel good about. It's gossip with the imprimatur of social justice. 

But what it's not, and this is kind of crucial, is any more likely to be true than the other, less noble kinds of gossip, and I think this is where the sanctification of the whisper network has led us somewhat astray. There's a sense that this type of gossip is elevated somehow, purer than ordinary rumors. That it can simply be believed, and that there's no harm in spreading it uncritically—  which really hit home during the aforementioned reporting process, when I realized that six different people, each claiming knowledge of a slightly different but very sordid offense, were all actually riffing on the same vague and unverifiable Facebook post from someone who knew someone who heard something. The differences stemmed from the fact that each had embellished minor details in the telling, filling in the blanks like a mad lib. 

It was one of those things where there's no fire, just lots of smoke — but if you're looking to talk shit, smoke is enough. Smoke is plenty. Smoke gets you whispered about, on the network. And this is the point at which you're really screwed, because the whisper network is like a self-fueled smoke machine. The fact that you're being whispered about means you're the type of guy who gets whispered about, and if you're the type of guy who gets whispered about, well, you deserve whatever you get. What did you actually do? Who knows! Who cares?! Not the guy who posted this, that’s for sure:

This is what happens when gossip is given the gloss of moral authority. And it's all so silly, because if there's anything we've learned from the absolute debacle of the Shitty Media Men list, it's that every attempt to do this inevitably devolves into chaos (and, sometimes, lawsuits!), owing to the fact that there's no accounting for taste. 

Women, as the radical notion goes, are people; we do not share one singular concept of what makes a man desirable or dull or creepy; one woman's red flag is another's red light special, and so on. I have friends who have told me in earnest that they think Henry Cavill is not that handsome. I have a friend who married a guy who looks so much like the pudgy Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark that every time my husband and I watch that movie, we say, "Hey, there's Brian!" Do I love and respect these women, yes; would I ever substitute their judgment for my own on the question of whether a given man is a good idea, absolutely not. In my own life I have warned a friend about a man exactly once, and that was only because he was a notorious bed-wetter. (She thanked me, but decided to take her chances.)

The idea that we would, or could, plug into some sort of collective consciousness, a Matrix for Ladies, that relieves us of the burden of forming our own opinions about the people we encounter: there's something about it that feels, if not sexist exactly, then agency-denying in a way that doesn't sit well. The guy women warn each other about might very occasionally be Charles Manson, but mostly he's somebody's future husband.

And maybe more importantly, I wonder who has not, at some point in his dating life, been the type of guy people warn each other about. Not just men, but everyone. I think about the guys who ended up on the Shitty Media Men list for things like "flirting" or "weird lunch dates", or for having sleazy but consensual affairs. I sometimes to try imagine what it would be like if women were suddenly subject, en masse, to the same sort of pawing-through of our dating histories, the same diligent cataloguing by the internet's offense archaeologists of our every fuck-up, every failed romance, every flirtation that didn't pan out or breakup that got uglier than it should have. I think about the time I was 22 and my boyfriend dumped me in Penn Station and I started sobbing so hysterically, begging him not to leave me, that a homeless man sleeping nearby startled awake and shot him a look of pity. For all I know, I'm on a list of my own somewhere: Midtown Manhattan Histrionics. 

Let he among us who has never screamed "You said you loved me!" outside a TGIFridays cast the first stone.