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Consent: It’s Not Sexy – The New Inquiry

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I too have sat facing a blinking cursor with everything and nothing more to say about sexual harassment. About assault. About rape. Me too, I thought, as I scrolled through my feed, but why did I recoil from this collective exercise in testimony? Was it the performativity of the hashtag? Was it the frame of personal narrative and of individualized circumstance, when rape’s endemic effects contradict the possessive exceptionality of writing about “my rape”? Did I want to write about rape that is not possessive but dispersed, in the air? When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, my brother asked what I made of it, and I texted back “...not surprised.” A week later, when Artforum’s Knight Landesman joined the procession of firings, I signed a petition against sexual harassment in the art world titled “Not Surprised.” The slogan was derived from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms T-shirt series. A truism is a statement that offers nothing new because it restates the obvious. At a #MeToo rally outside a T

I too have sat facing a blinking cursor with everything and nothing more to say about sexual harassment. About assault. About rape. Me too, I thought, as I scrolled through my feed, but why did I recoil from this collective exercise in testimony? Was it the performativity of the hashtag? Was it the frame of personal narrative and of individualized circumstance, when rape’s endemic effects contradict the possessive exceptionality of writing about “my rape”? Did I want to write about rape that is not possessive but dispersed, in the air? When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, my brother asked wh

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