BOOKS READ:
- The Female Persuasion—Meg Wolitzer
- Conversations with Friends—Sally Rooney
- Crudo—Olivia Laing
- Little Fires Everywhere—Celeste Ng
- How to Listen to Jazz—Ted Gioia
BOOKS BOUGHT:
- The New Testament—Jericho Brown
- There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé—Morgan Parker
- Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway
- Revolution—Todd S. Purdum
“The culture has changed over the years,” explained former British defense secretary Michael Fallon, following his resignation from the Cabinet after repeatedly placing his hand on the knee of a female journalist. “What might have been acceptable ten years ago is clearly not acceptable now.” Fallon resigned in November 2017, so he is talking about those heady years between 2002 and 2007, years mostly lost to the mists of time, when Taylor Swift’s songs were country inflected, we watched all five seasons of The Wire, and it was perfectly acceptable for a gentleman to grope a lady without asking for permission first. “I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different,” said Harvey Weinstein, whose job description and crimes need no explanation here. “That was the culture then.”
Perhaps the eagle-eyed reader will see a theme developing here: before all you women came along with your aggressive hashtags, anything went, and nobody minded. Indeed, not only did nobody mind, but everyone—men and women—was probably happier.
What enrages me about this particular line of defense is that I was born five years after Fallon and Weinstein, who were both born in 1952, and in my entire lifetime it has never been OK to behave in the way that these men have. I went to college in the 1970s, and several workplaces in the 1980s, and I knew how to behave, not because of any inmate moral sense or enlightened parenting, but because the writers and thinkers of generations before mine had done the work for me. Germaine Greer had written The Female Eunuch; Gloria Steinem was famous; Spare Rib, the influential British feminist magazine, was available in any bookshop; Virago publishing had been founded; there were Reclaim the Night marches. The Au Pairs released the single “It’s Obvious”—“You’re equal, but different, you’re equal, but different, it’s obvious”—in 1980, and everyone I knew could sing it. Michael Fallon was an English public (private) schoolboy who probably didn’t meet a woman until he had his own secretary, but Harvey Weinstein knew about all of this stuff. Feminism wasn’t some kind of arcane belief with three disciples at UC Berkeley; it was mainstream, and every man was aware of it. If you...
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contributor
contributor
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
