Conflict Is Not Abuse Review: Wow, Fuck Sarah Schulman

you can't stalk people into liking you!

A picture of Sarah Schulman. Via Wondermark.

[content note: discussions of abuse, harassment, and stalking]

I.

Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse is controversial in queer and leftist circles. Some see it as a courageous book which tells the truth about toxic victimhood dynamics and the culture of disposability in woke communities. Others see it as an abuse apologist screed which makes people think it’s progressive to shrug off the missing stairs predating on people who trusted the only place they thought was safe from societal oppression.

I think it is about how Sarah Schulman is an emotionally exhausting human being.

II.

Conflict Is Not Abuse is not a well-written book. Schulman Capitalizes random Words throughout the text As If She were the Protagonist of the Award-Winning Susannah Clarke Novel Piranesi. Topics are dropped for a dozen pages and then picked up at random.¹ She digresses constantly: the innocent reader is left wondering what “is it morally wrong for adult men to live with their lesbian mothers?”² has to do with Conflict or indeed Abuse. For reasons I cannot comprehend, the Israel/Palestine chapter consists mostly of Tweets and posts and comments from Schulman’s Facebook, presented with no contextualization. The overall vibe is that of a breakup email detailing all of the many misdeeds of your ex, the sort you write for catharsis and then delete in the morning, except extended to 288 pages and short-listed for the Lambda Literary Award. I desperately want to know if she fired her editor.

In part because Conflict Is Not Abuse is so badly written, it is easy to steelman it into something good, indeed something that people in many queer and leftist communities are desperate for. The steelmanned version goes something like this:

Sometimes when a person is cruel, they’re cruel because they have learned that it’s all right to hurt some kinds of people, or that only their own feelings matter, or that you don’t have to take certain people’s needs into account. But sometimes when a person is cruel, it’s because they’re hurt or scared. They fly into a rage over minor things, because they’re afraid that if they don’t the person will walk all over them. They emotionally manipulate their romantic partners into not leaving, because they don’t know how they’d pay the rent or keep the lights on otherwise. They lash out about a tasteless but basically harmless joke, because it feels like that joke has the weight of every insult and every bully and every lost job and every familial rejection they’ve ever experienced.

It’s important for people to be safe. But being safe isn’t the same as feeling safe. People are scared of situations that remind them of situations where they were badly hurt—even if those situations are actually fine. Someone who almost drowned freezes up around a pool with a lifeguard; someone who was spiritually abused feels threatened by any members of their former religion. And people often learn bad lessons from their traumatic past experiences, lessons like “if someone disagrees with me, I’m in danger” or “I have to be able to control everyone or they’ll hurt me.”

In woke communities, victimhood gets you social power. To some extent, this is good: it’s correcting for an outside world where no one listens to the experiences of abuse victims, disabled people, people of color, queer people, etc. But it creates two problems. First, people can pretend to be victimized even when they really weren’t, to get social power or to stir up mobs against people they don’t like. Second, it makes people want to think of themselves as victims. You can’t go “my life is good” or “actually, this situation was mostly my fault”, or people will stop listening to you. You’ll be dismissed as privileged, and therefore your beliefs are meaningless. No one will want to invite you to the cool parties.

These problems feed into each other. People behave cruelly because they’re hurt and scared. They feel that way even when nothing bad is actually happening to them, because they’ve learned to feel unsafe and threatened in objectively safe situations. Because victimhood gives you cachet, other people assume that the hurt person’s cruel behavior is right and just. And because of the rewards of victimhood, it’s very difficult for a person to step out of this system, take responsibility for their own actions, realize that their feelings are different from reality, and begin to behave ethically.

This is a real problem, I’ve seen it a lot, and if Conflict Is Not Abuse were actually about this I would love it and recommend it to all my friends.

III.

I don’t have anywhere else in this post to fit in two complaints. First, Sarah Schulman claims that female-to-male transmission of HIV is a myth (?! did all the HIV-positive straight men in Africa spontaneously generate?).

Second, her discussion of borderline personality disorder is ableist in the extreme, centering borderlines’ loved ones and refusing to acknowledge any pain borderlines ourselves experience or any symptoms other than getting angry at people for no reason. It culminates in her accusing both Nazis and the state of Israel of having borderline personality disorder.

Let it be known I have complaints about both of those things. What the fuck is wrong with Sarah Schulman.

IV.

Most of the discourse I saw about this book before I read it was about trigger warnings. People have bizarre priorities, as we’ll see later. But because it came up so much, I feel I should address Schulman’s views on trigger warnings. She writes:

In a healthy educational forum, students engage materials regardless of agreement or comfort level and then analyze, debate, critique, and learn from them, addressing the discomfort as well as the text. This is why, in my fiction writing classes at the public City University of New York, College of Staten Island, I have a “no censorship” rule. Since this is an art class, students can engage any subject, event, or character and use any language that they feel is appropriate. However, at the same time, any student who has criticism, insight, or objection to these elements has the equal right to express their views in detail.

I agree that this sort of class is a valuable educational experience. I agree that allowing students to opt out of all potentially disturbing³ material can keep them from learning what they’re supposed to be learning: the atrocities of history, the experiences of people very different from them, how to engage with ideas that challenge them.

But this sort of class is also a very… particular?… educational experience. Life is short, art is long, and there are a lot of things people can learn. We accept that people can opt out of certain educational experiences: for example, I (and probably also Sarah Schulman) have consistently opted out of learning calculus. And an unbiased assessment, I think, would show that calculus is a more important skill than writing and appreciating potentially disturbing fiction, so if we let people opt out of the one we can let people opt out of the other.

We also agree that people should be able to have educational experiences a la carte. Physics generally requires calculus understanding, and you’re not really going to be able to get it unless you know math. But my college still offered a no-math physics class to help those of us who know little math understand what we could about the nature of our world. Similarly, I think, really good creative writing requires comfort with things that make you uncomfortable. But some people might want to develop fiction appreciation skills or write short stories for a few friends, and it makes sense to offer no-disturbing-content fiction writing classes for those people.

A friend of mine was unable to get a teaching degree, in part because the teacher who taught a particular required introductory class themed it around colonialism and assigned only books that included rape. I’m not going to discuss whether they had experienced trauma; that’s victimhood-as-currency and it’s not the point. The question is whether we think—given the teacher shortage—that the ability to engage with disturbing art is so important that we can’t let people teach elementary schoolers phonics and arithmetic without having mastered it. I think… no? Honestly, it’d be more important for them to learn calculus.

And so there ought to be options for people to get teaching degrees—and many other kinds of degrees—without engaging with disturbing material. The fact that Schulman happens to teach a certain skill, or that it is very valuable for many people, doesn’t mean that every single student should have to learn it.

V.

Schulman distinguishes “conflict” from “abuse.” Abuse she defines in line with the usual definition in feminist psychology: one person maintaining a system of pervasive and unethical dominance and control over another person. Everything else she lumps into “conflict.”

Schulman believes that all conflict should be handled the same way: an in-person conversation between the participants in the conflict, perhaps mediated by members of the community. Both parties should take full responsibility for their part in the conflict, knowing that every conflict is caused by both participants. If a satisfactory resolution can’t be reached, one party may choose to cut off contact with the other, but only with conditions (“I will speak to you again when you have been clean for a year”); it is never acceptable to cut someone off permanently. The police should not at any point be called.

I would never say that this is a bad way to resolve conflicts. It works well in a lot of different situations! However, some conflicts are far too serious for this.

I want to emphasize that I’m not strawmanning here. I am drawing on examples specifically discussed in the book.

Once, a black woman at an artists’ residency, apropos of nothing, punched Sarah Schulman very hard in the head. Schulman concludes that the root problem was the racism in the artists’ residency, which resulted in the black woman being the only black person there. Therefore, Schulman’s response shouldn’t be reporting it to the police or even filing a complaint with the residency; it should be campaigning against racist admissions policies for artists’ residencies.

Schulman also discusses a woman in a previously toxic but not abusive relationship who, in a fit of anger, threw something at her partner hard enough to break a bone. The partner pressed charges and the woman got probation. Schulman thinks this was an extraordinarily unjust outcome, and instead the partner should have processed her feelings about her breakup and her family of origin until she no longer wanted to press charges. Further, the partner should recognize that her own “mean, childish, and unfair” behavior helped cause the problem.

This is batshit.

Honestly, it is the victimhood mentality that Conflict Is Not Abuse supposedly critiques? It hurts when your partner behaves in a mean, childish, and unfair way. However, you still need to not break their bones. It hurts to experience racism or to feel alienated because you’re the only person of your race at an artists’ residency. However, you still need to not punch people, especially people who are neither behaving in a racist way nor involved in admissions.

Neither incident is technically abuse: they were both one-off acts of violence without a context of overall domination.⁴ But things other than “maintaining a system of pervasive and unethical dominance and control over another person” can be seriously wrong.

I support enormous reforms to the American criminal justice system, including legalizing/decriminalizing many actions and lightening most punishments. However, I think it’s okay for the criminal justice system to handle literal violent assault, with fines, probation, or imprisonment as appropriate to the case. People respond to incentives; if they’re reliably punished for hitting people, they are less likely to hit people. If my five-year-old can handle the complexities of “even though I’m mad, if I hit people I will go to time out, so I shouldn’t hit people,” I believe adults are also able to understand this.

Schulman correctly notices that both participants contribute to a conflict. But both people contributing doesn’t mean that both people are equally responsible. If someone punches you in the head, and your contribution to the conflict was not advocating against racist artists’ residency admissions policies as much as you could have, you have perhaps one hundred thousandth of the responsibility. It is batshit to expect you to spend any amount of time thinking about your role, in much the same way it is batshit to expect you, before having a child, to consider your child’s likely future contribution to traffic congestion in London—when you live in Lagos.

Schulman also assumes that the attacked person’s role in the conflict is related to doing things the attacker doesn’t like. But surely much of the time the attacked person’s role in the conflict is something like “spending time around violent people” or “giving people things when they hit you, so they realize that hitting you is a good way to get things they want” or “not calling the fucking police.”

VI.

Schulman is against shunning. I too am against shunning, in all but the most serious cases. Unless there is a genuine safety concern (such as a serial rapist), you should allow people to sanction the sanctioners. It’s okay to not invite Alice to your party. It’s not okay to not invite Alice to your party, or anyone who invites Alice to their parties, or anyone who invites anyone who invites anyone who invites Alice to their party, etc. These self-perpetuating cycles of social isolation are a major tool used by dysfunctional and ideologically abusive communities to keep people in line. Individuals should decide who they hang out with, no matter how incomprehensible their taste is.

That is not what Schulman means by “shunning”!

Conflict Is Not Abuse is a rambling and incoherent book. At no point does she clearly lay out what she believes. I have to assemble her point of view like a jigsaw puzzle from pieces scattered in six different chapters. In short, if I misunderstood her, I’m sorry, and I wish she would take accountability for taking an Intro Composition class and learning about topic sentences.

Schulman discusses a case where she got lunch with someone, the person said that she wanted to hang out again, and the person ended up ghosting her:

I think she should have told me, “I said yes, but I realize now I am afraid, not as interested as I thought I was, shy, intimidated, afraid of being hurt again, don’t want the responsibility, whatever.” And I could have said, “Thank you for letting me know.” Or, even better, we could have talked through the anxiety. You know, helped each other…

Let’s imagine that this person did become accountable and in the end chose mutual kindness/accountability over accusation. She realized that she was mad at me for no reason caused by me, that this was old stuff acting itself out in new places, and so she did the right thing and picked up the phone. We talked. We saw each other, and the friendship was allowed to become important. So, happy ending. Out of a single phone call.

To be clear, Schulman is not just saying that you have to go “I’m too busy to hang out” instead of leaving people hanging forever. I agree that that’s a good thing to do. She’s specifically saying that you have to give a reason, that the other person gets to argue with your reason, and that if they win the argument you have to hang out.

As one of my beta readers pointed out, it’s interesting that Schulman jumps to “mad at me” and not, like, “realized they weren’t that excited,” “forgot to reply and then felt too embarrassed to bring it up again,” or “forgot to reply and then realized that Sarah Schulman would make A Whole Thing Out of it and decided ghosting was the better part of valor.”

She writes on the subject of ending relationships:

The performative conceit at the root of this kind of assaultive action [emailing people you don’t want to talk to them and they should go away] is the melodrama that email orders are a “last resort” in response to some horrible transgression. But the opposite is more likely true. Often a real conversation would illuminate nuances and correct misunderstandings. The real question is: Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? Why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict? There should be a relief in discovering that one is not being persecuted, but actually, in the way we have misconstrued these responsibilities, sadly the relief is in confirming that one has been “victimized.” It comes with the relieving abdication of responsibility.

According to Schulman, you’re not, in fact, allowed to permanently end a relationship at all, even an abusive relationship:

Of course, conflicted people can mutually agree that limiting contact between them is best. Or someone in Conflict (not Abuse) may not have the skills or sense of self to be able to communicate productively for some period of time, and can responsibly and kindly request a limit with terms. For example, “I’m not able to act responsibly; let’s have a separation and meet in three weeks and ask our friend Joe to help us communicate.” Even in an Abuse situation, terms should be responsible and reasonable. For example, “You stole my money to buy drugs, therefore when you have three years sober, we can get together and talk.”

She later writes:

If someone wishes to alter a relationship, they must discuss it with the other person, negotiate the change, and listen to the other person’s account. There is no ethical way around it.

Notice that outside of the very narrow situation “one partner is trying to maintain an unethical system of power and control over another,” you can’t even unilaterally decide to limit contact with someone, unless it is clear that this is your fault for not having enough strength of character. And as far as I can tell, this does not apply narrowly to committed relationships, but to literally every relationship you happen to form, up to and including “we got a nice lunch one time.”

It seems wise to preemptively shun Sarah Schulman before she gets any ideas.

I agree that people can break off relationships for stupid, dickish, or even cruel reasons. But in the absence of some kind of legal or moral obligation (child support, they’re the only doctor in your area and you need emergency medical treatment), “no” is a complete sentence. Even if, according to all laws of ethics and etiquette and reality itself, someone should want to hang out with you, don’t try to hang out with people who don’t want to talk to you. Let the trash take itself out.

It seems reasonable to say “before you stop talking to me, you should let me know why, in case it turns out to all have been a big misunderstanding.” Certainly, in some cases, this is a wise thing to do—especially if it is an important relationship or a relationship of many years’ standing. But Sarah Schulman reminds me of several exhausting people I have spent time with, which makes me respond to her suggestions by arching my back and hissing like a threatened cat.

My reasons for not wanting to spend time with someone aren’t necessarily very legible. I might be able to point to some annoying things you did, but I don’t have a sense of the underlying principle that makes these behaviors annoying and other behaviors fine. I don’t necessarily know why I’m getting the feeling that I’m being misgendered; I just know that I am. If you give me the creeps, I’m not going to be able to point to ten specific behaviors that creep me the fuck out—but I have learned to listen to that quiet voice in the back of my mind that says “this isn’t quite right.”

Most people don’t really want your reasons for disliking them, but if they did they would take “you annoy me” or “I find you morally despicable” as a sufficient reason not to be friends. However, emotionally exhausting people tend to view this as the start of a negotiation.

Me: well, I guess that I found it annoying when you said that my favorite painting is a piece of shit because a child could paint it.
Them: Let us debate whether abstract art is real art! Once you realize that I’m right, you won’t be annoyed by my trenchant art criticism.

Me: Well, I don’t want to talk to you because you wished me a happy Mother’s Day; I’m not my kid’s mom.
Them: All right! Thank you for telling me.
Them: [some time later] Are we friends now? I haven’t wished you a Happy Mother’s Day since!
Me: Well, no, because you invited me to the women-only clothing swap.
Them: Okay! I won’t do that either.
Them: [even later] Are we friends now? I haven’t wished you a Happy Mother’s Day or invited you to the women-only clothing swap!
Me: You assumed that I play with my kid and my husband doesn’t. And that I know how to contour. I think that the problem here is that you think of me as a woman, and no amount of me complaining about specific behavioral manifestations of this belief will cause you to actually change your behavior in the way I care about.
Them: Thought police! You believe in thoughtcrime! This is why people don’t support trans rights—trans people don’t tolerate dissent! Truly, trans people are the real bigots.

Me: I do not want to be friends with you because you are okay with torturing animals and terrorists.
Them: That's a dumb reason not to want to be friends with someone! We should value viewpoint diversity. Don’t you believe in free speech and liberalism? So much for the tolerant left.

I am displeased to discover that this behavior comes in Marxist as well as in Enlightened Centrist.

To be clear, I’m not whipping up a cancellation mob for people who think I know how to contour, or trying to stop anyone else from being friends with them, or even saying a mean thing to them. I just… do not want to be friends with those people personally, because it is unpleasant.

You can’t logically argue someone out of wanting to be friends with you by presenting an air-tight, irrefutable case that you don’t like them. If someone is sufficiently invested in being your friend, they can continue indefinitely to dispute points, make minor behavioral changes, or just fail to understand what you’re talking about. It is not worth it. You have to be willing to say “I don’t want to be friends with you, because I just don’t. Go away.”

Schulman has a bizarre hatred of email and demands that these negotiations take place in person. She writes:

I wish that all the people of the industrial world would sign a pledge that any negative exchange that is created on email or text must be followed by a live, in-person conversation.

Later, she says:

Most Americans have cell phones now. They can return phone calls on the walk from the subway station to their apartment buildings, from the car to the mall. There is no reason why people do not return phone calls except for the power-play of not answering.

Of course, there are many good reasons that people prefer text-based communication. It’s often easier to say things you mean when you have time to reflect and revise. It creates a paper trail, which is important for dealing with emotionally exhausting people. Some people have shitty hearing or audio processing and need to communicate over text.

But the thing I want to point to is Schulman’s demandingness. She has a right to the form of communication she prefers. If you don’t answer the phone—maybe you don’t like phone calls, or maybe you’re shepherding a five-year-old, or maybe you know this will get you tense and ruin your evening, or maybe you’re just enjoying your uninterrupted quiet walk for God’s sake—it is a power play and an attack. You can’t deal with her asynchronously when you have a few minutes free; you have to set aside a lunchtime or an evening to travel to where she is, in person, and talk with her about her feelings. And this is true for any negative communication over text—not just with people whom Schulman is important to and who have agreed to accommodate her preferences, but with anyone who leaves a snippy Facebook comment on one of her posts.

Between her demand for in-person/phone conversations and her refusal to accept that some people don’t want relationships, Schulman is essentially making a demand for an unbounded amount of anyone’s attention and emotional energy at any time.

But the problem goes deeper. Most of the time, when I don’t want to spend time with someone—not “never speak to me again,” just “I’ll make small talk if I happen to run into you but don’t want to make effort to spend time together”—I don’t have a clear reason. We failed to click. We didn’t have chemistry. The vibe was off. Whatever. If I don’t actively want to spend time with you, I’m not going to go out of my way to do so.

Throughout this book, I found myself wondering how much spare time Sarah Schulman has. I don’t have time for a friendship with everyone cool in the world. I have to write blog posts, feed my kid, engage in the forever war with the ants in my kitchen, and of course spend two hours on my couch eating popcorn and watching Fundie Fridays videos. I am already chronically neglecting my friends! My primary reason for not having a friendship with any person is that I’m just too busy.

The “happy ending” of the anecdote I opened this section with is that “the friendship is allowed to become important.” Throughout Conflict Is Not Abuse, Schulman at no point acknowledges that someone might just… not want to interact with someone else, not because of conflict or abuse, but simply because they have other things to do with their time. “You seem fine, but I have a bunch of people to talk to who are better than fine” is not a concept that exists in her world.

Similarly, Schulman has no concept that, if someone is unimportant to you, you might just decide to not resolve conflicts with them. Many people have said things to me that annoyed or upset me. The vast majority of the time, I shrug it off and move on: “maybe they had a bad day, maybe they said something they didn’t mean, maybe I misunderstood, maybe they actually think that. Whatever. Since I talk to this person like twice a month, I don’t care and it doesn’t affect my life.”

For me, processing feelings takes a lot of time and energy, and is one of the most unpleasant things I do regularly. Me processing feelings with you is something you earn, because I care about you and our relationship and want you to be a significant part of my life indefinitely. As far as I can tell, Schulman thinks that feelings processing with arbitrary people is something you’re entitled to by existing.

So far, so exhausting. But Schulman crosses over from “tiresome person” to “what the fuck”:

In another example from other people’s lives, sometimes angry, supremacist, or traumatized people send emails commanding, “Do not contact me.” I want to state here, for the record, that no one is obligated to obey a unidirectional order that has not been discussed. Negotiation is a human responsibility.

Later:

Refusing to be shunned for unjust, nonexistent, or absurd reasons is not “stalking.” Resisting unjustified punishment is not Abuse.

No, actually, that is stalking—colloquially if not legally.

Some people will not find any reason for avoiding them to be just, nonabsurd, and existent. No amount of discussion will convince some people to agree that they shouldn’t want to spend time with you, or that they can want to as much as they like but still won’t get to. Ultimately, you have to be able to go “no, go away” for any reason or no reason at all—or everyone is held hostage to the neediest and most entitled people.

Schulman’s statements enable abuse. People who push small boundaries push large boundaries. People who won’t pay attention to “I don’t want to talk to you” or “I don’t want to invite you to my party” or “please stop emailing me” are the kind of people who don’t pay attention to “I don’t want to have sex with you” or “I don’t want to have children with you” or “don’t hit me.” Abusive relationships typically involve making it difficult or impossible for the victim to leave—in some cases going as far as killing the victim once they leave. “It is wrong to keep people from leaving a relationship” makes it easier for communities to name abusive behavior. “Welllllll, it depends on circumstance, and there’s nuance, and you should really look at your role in the problem…” traps people in violent relationships.

Schulman’s statements also enable false accusations of abuse. Notice that in Schulman’s view the only reason you’re allowed to end a relationship indefinitely is abuse. If a relationship is bad for you and you need it to end, obviously you’re going to accuse the other person of abuse! And there’s a genuine incentive to accuse emotionally exhausting people of abuse just to get them to shut up and go away.

Many people (especially women) believe they can only say “no” to a relationship if they have a good reason. In the less bad cases, this leads to bullying: you have to establish that liking comic books or wearing a fedora or sleeping on a floor bed are Objectively Bad, so you can refuse to date people with those traits. In the worse cases, it leads to people losing all their friends or being falsely accused of wrongdoing.

Being able to go “I don’t like you, because I just don’t” is an important safeguard. People don’t have to reach for false accusations if they know that their “I don’t want to spend time with you” will be respected.

Finally, Schulman displays an insane victim mindset. If a person doesn’t want to call me, I am a VICTIM. If someone doesn’t let me present a rational argument for why we should be friends, I am a VICTIM. If someone doesn’t have time for me, I am a VICTIM. If someone says “never contact me again,” I am a VICTIM. And as a victim, I am exempt from normal social rules—no matter how much my behavior might threaten or hurt others.

VII.

Schulman has wild views on sexual harassment. She writes:

There have been times in my life when I was attracted to someone and didn’t want to admit it, or that I was attracted to or even in love with her, or at least loved her, and had no awareness of this. It is not that I was lying, but that I was defended. I blocked access to my own real feelings. I did this to defend a story about myself that I felt safe maintaining, even if it wasn’t true. But sometimes the other person saw the truth that I was unable to access or be accountable for...

Sexism has exploited this truth into the lie that men always know more about women than we know about ourselves. But refuting male Supremacy does not mean pretending that we all understand ourselves completely. What if she reciprocated or expressed what I was not developed enough to express? What if I became angry, or denied the reality? Blamed her as a substitute for examining myself? What if she tried to help me recognize or be accountable to that reality? Certainly this dynamic of defended refusal is a normative part of many people’s coming to terms with their sexual imaginations and can in fact continue after sexual identity is well in place. Is the act of honest pushback a kind of “harassment,” or is it a gift?

Of course, people come to themselves in their own time, but what if the denial manifests in something harmful to the other person? What if I was flirting but didn’t realize what I was feeling and doing? What if she responded? What if I became angry or withdrawn at her recognition of a truth I could not recognize? What if I blamed her and asked her to carry the burden of my own dishonesty? What do we call that? Of course, I should not feel expected to kiss someone I don’t want to kiss. But what if I don’t want to want to kiss her but still want to? Then is the other’s forward response an invasion? I don’t think so.

Later:

There is a contemporary, quite visible, collectively agreed-upon, almost traditional social model of “abuse” where a man invites a woman to respond to his desires when she does not return those desires, nor has she suggested or advertised that she does. He is supposed to recognize that she never felt nor suggested those feelings. If at this point in the narrative he physically or, more interpretively, psychologically forces her in some way, we all agree that this is Abuse. It is “power over.” Usually the alternative ending offered is that instead of force we expect him to have recognition, to apologize for the misunderstanding. Then she can leave and tell everyone that he “hit” on her, but she turned him down. That is the “happy ending” version of this scenario. Given constraints on women’s behavior, she retains her purity, her appropriate female lack of erotic feeling. She gets to announce that she is attractive, as women are supposed to be, but she is not attracted, as women are not supposed to be. But what if she was attracted to him and did show it, and won’t acknowledge that? And he doesn’t want to live with the “he hit on me” narrative. As a writer, I know that there is, after all, the right to be described accurately. What he wants is the “I was attracted to him but I wouldn’t acknowledge it, so I got confused” version…

I recite those few words: “I was abused” or “she was abusive” or “it was an abusive relationship” and it is immediately understood that I am right, and I am violated, and I am in danger and therefore deserving of group acclaim. While the other s/he is wrong, a harasser, s/he had desire and I didn’t, so I am clean and s/he is abusive. And if they wanted to straighten this out, or discuss it until more complexities are revealed, then s/he is a stalker, while I am clean. I am not sullied by desire or sexual curiosity, I have done nothing wrong, and therefore I am a victim. I am an ethical virgin.

I do appreciate her statement that you shouldn’t have to kiss people you don’t want to kiss.

I certainly agree that sometimes people are attracted to other people and don’t want to admit it to themselves. I even agree that sometimes a woman is attracted to a man and doesn’t want to admit it because of her internalized sex-negativity. But there are also a number of cases where one person engages in wishful thinking about whether the other person wants them—and a number of cases where a person is disingenuously pretending that the other person wanted them in order to get away with coercing them into sex.

We aren’t telepaths. We can’t reliably know whether Alice was attracted to Bob and didn’t want to admit it, or whether she wasn’t attracted to Bob at all. That’s fine, because it doesn’t matter.

Most people do not sleep with the vast majority of people they’re attracted to. Being attracted to someone doesn’t mean you want to have sex with them. You might be in a monogamous relationship,⁵ or only enjoy sex in a committed relationship, or expect that sex with that person wouldn’t be very fun, or just be busy. And, yes, maybe you have deep-seated psychological issues that cause you to say “no” to sexual encounters you’d like or want. It literally does not matter to the person doing the hitting-on which of those is true, because all of them lead to the same result—the person doesn’t want sex.

You don’t, actually, have a right to be described accurately. As a writer—specifically, as a person who has written on the Internet for thirteen years—I know that people will always describe you inaccurately. To this very day I have people saying I married and had children with Scott Alexander, a guy I dated for a year and a half when I was 22. Such is the human condition. People see only a tiny fragment of the complex and many-faceted kaleidoscope that is you, and given the slightest opportunity they will expand that fragment into a full-ass funhouse mirror.

You are not entitled to “discuss it until more complexities are revealed” every time you hit on someone and they turn you down. The act of hitting on someone does not create an unbounded obligation for them to talk to you until the two of you come to a consensus about what their feelings are. And trying to make people fulfill this obligation that you made up is, yes, harassment.

Maybe you’re the one who is misdescribing the person you hit on! Many such cases.

Schulman doesn’t just think that you can stalk people to get them to agree with your interpretation of events, she also thinks you can stalk them to convince them that they should date you:

There is a range of persuasion narratives to the experience of “romance.” Sometimes there is a seduction involved, which is a winning over. Sometimes there is a reassurance process. Sometimes a person starts out resistant but then opens up, or realizes that they are confusing their past with their present, or that they are simply afraid of change. Sometimes one party can see clearly into the future while the other’s vision is obscured by unresolved but ancient experiences. Sometimes someone needs to be courted. Sometimes one party has the wrong impression of the other person, cannot see their gifts.

I agree all those sentences are individually true but collectively they sure look like a justification for hitting on people who do not want you to hit on them.

Many people have observed that romantic comedies are full of stalking. Schulman shows that one man’s modens tollens is another man’s modus ponens:

Unfortunately, in our contemporary confusion, at the point [in the romantic comedy] where the other knocks on our protagonist’s door, they are a “stalker.” We are no longer allowed to drop by unannounced when things are fraught. She can’t call on the phone to deliver the monologue of persuasion with an open heart, because our heroine hides behind voice mail. She can’t send it by email, because it will either be deleted, or forwarded to thousands. If she has knocked, called, and emailed, she is now officially, in the era of overstating harm, a “harasser.” The person who fights for honest conversation that can heal, such a well-known and beloved character of yore, is, alas, no more. And so Ms. Reluctant never gets the affective reality, the skin, the voice, the tone, the eyes, the smile, the jokes, and especially the back and forth, the interactivity that reminds her of what it feels like to let someone in, the interactivity that produces a revelation that her future is not impossible. Instead, past pain dominates over possibility. To suggest otherwise is forbidden.

If the movies replicated these restrictive values, movies would be even worse than they are already. No surprises. First impulse, only impulse. But in reality, romance doesn’t always start off on the right foot, two people don’t always see the potential in one another at the same time, and thankfully, other people can change us with their hope, forgiveness, and optimism. We can make each other’s lives better, despite all our fears. Sometimes one of us knows that before the other… As a novelist, I simply cannot abandon the possibility of reversal.

As a novelist, I simply cannot abandon the idea that many things are romantic in fiction and not good ideas in real life. I personally enjoy novels where people pine after each other helplessly for thirty years while refusing to give any hint of their interest, but in real life I think you should ask people out after like two weeks. Similarly, you should strive to avoid falling in love with your family’s ancient enemy, trying to redeem war criminals with the power of love, getting unexpectedly pregnant by strange billionaires, or pretending to date someone for contrived bet or inheritance reasons.

People who push small boundaries push big boundaries! If someone calls and emails and stops by your house to provide the affective reality that will convince you to date them, then if you want to break up with them in the future, they will not let you. There is a serious risk that they will not stop at skin, voice, tone, eyes, smile, and jokes as persuasive tactics, either.

Mostly you should date people who are enthusiastic about dating you? But I’m not going to say I’ve never charmed someone into reconsidering their anti-Ozy-dating stance. It is crucial, however, as a matter of ethics, that the person wants to be charmed. If they like it when you flirt with them, give them presents, spend time with them, compliment them, pay attention to what they like, go ahead. If it makes them unhappy and uncomfortable… well, that’s a hell of a thing to do as an expression of what you claim is love.

It is true that sometimes people are closed off to love and they’d be happier if they gave love a chance. But that doesn’t mean that anything you do to them intending to be helpful is all right. You can’t stalk people into overcoming the deep-seated personality flaws that, you believe, are the only reason that they don’t want to date you.

I don’t think we’ll lose much romance if people only seduce those who want to be seduced.

VIII.

Ultimately, Conflict Is Not Abuse is the among the purest works of victim mindset I have ever read. It just has different ideas than normal people about what makes you a victim. Someone physically attacking you and breaking your bones, for example, doesn’t make you a victim. Schulman wants to reserve that status for people who have truly suffered, such as:

• People whose phone calls were not returned.

• People who got in Twitter discourse, but whose interlocutor didn’t want to meet up in person to talk about it.

• People who were broken up with even though they didn’t consent to being broken up with.

• People who have provided an extremely convincing argument about why they deserve to be friends with someone, and yet that person still doesn’t want to be friends with them.

• People who hit on someone who claims not to be attracted to them, even though they totally were, bro.

• People who were rejected romantically without even the opportunity to stand outside a window holding a boom box that’s playing In Your Eyes.

• People who have been cruelly iced out just because they broke someone’s bone which is, clearly, not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Ironically, this entire line of argumentation is a great example of how thinking of yourself as a victim causes you to harm or abuse others. Maybe it’s performance art.

1. Thus necessitating very long quotes in order to give the reader of this post any idea what she’s getting at.

2. Yes. For a queer sexual radical, Schulman has a surprisingly short list of acceptable family structures.

3. The word I’m using instead of “triggering” because literally anything can be triggering—people get PTSD flashbacks about certain haircuts, scents, wallpapers, and anything else you can imagine.

4. At least if you trust Schulman’s report about the nature of the women’s relationship, which I’m willing to for the sake of argument.

5. Schulman specifically calls out monogamy as a reason why people might repress their desires, which is Bad and they should be Honest and admit they were Leading People On.