Byrne, one of his accusers, called that New Yorker confession Dazs long I know metoo is coming for me so Id better get ahead of it essay (a deeply cynical opinion held by some journalists as well).He has written for Bloomberg, The Economist, ESPN, Fortune, National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Playboy, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.The views expressed in this commentary are solely the authors.I heard him tell that anecdote at a recent book signing, along with the addition that she tells him he used to be cute, but that he traded his face for his brain.
In their next phone call, perhaps shell expound upon that perennial disappointment. Some by choice and others by dint of being exposed, men are coming to terms with their own boorishness and brutality, the monster within and the monster next door. Exactly this. Daz, both a survivor of abuse and a purveyor of it, can be a fulcrum of healing if we let him. Another woman, short story writer Carmen Maria Machado, said on Twitter that Diaz lashed out at her after she questioned one of his protagonists relationship to women. A third woman, novelist Zinzi Clemmons, whose allegations at a book event and then on Twitter prompted the posts from Byrne and Machado, said he forcibly kissed her when she was a graduate student at Columbia University. In her telling, Daz suggests going to her apartment to assess her manuscript and they have consensual sex because, she said, I thought we were soul mates. Similar politics. Similar styles. I told him this. He said he agreed. He went back to New York. She visited. And then he asked her to clean his kitchen, because his depression was too debilitating. She says she called him out and he replied: Sweetie, you can take the man out of the D.R., but you cant take the Dominican out of the man. These alleged incidents, however, span from 4 to 22 years ago. Who is Daz today Isnt this conversation between Diaz and Boston Review associate editor Avni Majithia-Sejpal, in which he analyzes Donald Trumps sexual shamelessness and comments on the public exposure of patriarchy, what a convert to feminism sounds like Isnt this what, in this discussion of the power structures of feminism and white supremacy, a reformed misogynist acts like when he indicts the taboo of calling out patriarchy as lethal to women. But what of the men What do we want men in the metoo reckoning to be, besides apologetic and broken and punished do we even know Dont we want them to be better In Daz we have a man who is working out his betterment in public, assuredly as a template for other wounded and hurtful men especially immigrant men, English-as-a-second-language men, men of color, and other literary men who are protected by the safeguards of their white privilege. That is the reason I chose to tell the story of my rape and its damaging aftermath. I am listening to and learning from womens stories in this essential and overdue cultural moment. We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries. And a writer, especially one of his stature, should know better than to call prepared remarks mediated through a literary agent a conversation. And Diazs recent follow-up to all his quasi-autobiographical misogynist fiction has been a career about-face: Islandborn, a childrens book about Lola, an immigrant schoolgirl from a Caribbean island who is tasked with remembering her homeland, a place she left when she was too young to remember. The book has a compelling scene in which Lola, alone in an elevator, calls out to her lost memories of the Island, like a cat But like a cat, the Island did not come. He recounted the assaults in The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma, a recent New Yorker piece, writing that they pushed him to suicide attempts.
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