Grandma, The Rapist

Years ago, the word “rape” was reduced to meaninglessness. So too was “sexual assault,” a conclusory phrase that offered no clue as to what actually happened, but wrapped it up in the “survivor’s” grievance of victimization for having suffered…something. But as uninformative as “sexual assault” was, rape still held the cache of creating a mental image of a man throwing a woman to the ground in a dark alley, ripping off her clothing and overpowering her while ramming himself into her.

It was a horrifying image, the sort that any decent person would find horrifying and repugnant. And those making accusations cared nothing about abusing what happened to some to color themselves victims of an enthusiastic sexual encounter after a couple of beers that gave her the right to claim the next day, month or year that she was raped. This was dangerous enough, but what about grandma?

Before scooping up your grandson, niece, or little cousins for a hug this holiday season, the internet would like you to know: “Kids who think they need to comply with adult requests for affection are more likely to be sexually abused.” This warning is the punchline of a recent article entitled “Why You Should Never Make Your Child Hug Anyone”. It’s representative of a miserable discourse that briefly relented during the elbow-bumping days of the pandemic, but has otherwise spilled over regularly in the past decade. The Today show has featured a therapist mom who won’t even hug her own kids without consent, while the Girl Scouts of America trotted out the topic in 2017 as a sort of #MeToo movement for kids —#MommyAndMeToo, perhaps?

This new festive tradition, where we tell our wizened elders to piss off and keep their grubby hands and lips to themselves, obviously has its roots in the all-consuming contemporary dialogue about consent. But this holiday season it hits differently. Rejoice, for gone are the grim days of socially distanced drive-by birthday parties and Thanksgiving over FaceTime; once again, Grandma can be treated like an avatar for child molesters the world over right to her face.

We haven’t yet reached the point when sensitive mommies lose their minds because grandma gives little Billy a hug because she loves him as grandmas have loved their grandsons forever, although sensitive mommy won’t tell Billy to “hug grandma” if he would rather use his time breaking things or shrieking his demand for gummy bears, but we’re not far from prosecuting rapey grandma when we realize that the prosecution of Junot Diaz was over a chaste peck on the cheek.

The recirculation of articles like these coincides with another notable entry into the every-touch-is-a-bad-touch canon, triggered by a recent update on the MeTooing of author Junot Diaz. Diaz, a Pulitzer-winning fiction writer, was mostly (not fully) cancelled in 2018, after an accusation from writer Zinzi Clemmons that he had once “cornered” and “forcibly kissed” her. Accounts of verbal abuse and interpersonal cruelty from other women swiftly followed, along with rumours that dozens of additional allegations were coming down the pike — or would, if not for the victims’ fears of retaliation for speaking out.

This was all about “sexual assault,” but the recent outing of facts by Ben Smith broke the omerta of MeToo by describing what actually happened.

The bombshell, four years later, is a heretofore-unreported revelation in Smith’s article: that the kiss in question was not the open-mouthed, tongue-thrusting assault most readily conjured by the word “forcible”, but a peck on the cheek. Yet for every person who was thrown for a loop by this information, there was another just as willing to die on the hill of “A kiss on the cheek without explicit prior consent is assault, actually”. In the former category was the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, tweeting bewilderedly: “Imagine getting up and preparing to publicly accuse someone of assault and knowing full well that what you were actually referring to was a kiss on the cheek.” In the latter category was Diaz accuser Monica Byrne (who described a public but heated dinner party conversation with the author as “verbal sexual assault”), as well as recently-fired Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez, herself one of the #MeToo movement’s more controversial figures.

Did the accusers hang their heads in disgrace as they admitted they took a banal greeting, a kiss on the cheek, and wrapped it in the lies of sexual assault to manufacture offense? Of course not. They instead locked arms to boldly insist that if they felt like it was an assault, then that’s what it was and only a rapist would question their lived experience.

This is not just about the inexpressible, ugly weirdness of kids being instructed that it’s okay to recoil from Grandma because her hugs are non-consensual (while Grandma is in turn instructed that if her feelings are hurt, she’s guilty of the same horny entitlement that leads men to commit sex crimes). It’s about the pathologising of normal human togetherness, and the normalising of an extremely online brand of misanthropy, all with the pretence that this is the only way to be a decent human being, the only way to show you care.

As Kat Rosenfield explains, this irrationally fragile sensibility has metastasized from rape to any violation of one’s right to isolate in a bubble.

One of the most remarkable responses to the Junot Diaz cheek kiss was: “It’s okay not to want any intrusions into one’s space and that should be in fact, the standard.” It’s the “standard” that gets me, which if implemented would establish those of us who enjoy physical contact as deviations if not deviants, in need of stern correction.

Will the new normal be to valorize isolation, epidemic depression and anxiety notwithstanding, lest some human being venture too close to another person’s bubble and be accused of, and canceled if not prosecuted for, rape? Poor grandma will be denied the joy of hugging her grandson, but the risk of any lesser person touching another human being is too great to suffer.

Having successfully flipped the script so that those who yearn for human contact became the avatar for destructive selfishness, while the recluses in their hermetically-sealed bubbles are the heroes holding society together, how are we meant to come together again?

Have we learned nothing?