Portside

It’s time to tell the whole truth about Junot Diaz. Last month, he came out with a powerful piece in the New Yorker about having been raped as a boy. He connected the dots to his own toxic behavior in relationships where he abandoned and betrayed his partners and slept around.

But the story doesn’t end there. Starting with a post-midnight tweet on May 4th, writers Zinzi Clemmons, Carmen Maria Machado, and Monica Byrne began publicly filling out the picture of Diaz’s harm to women, and it’s not pretty. Sexual assault. Verbal abuse and bullying. I believe these women are telling the truth, and I believe that we may hear more and worse before this truth-telling is done. Yet as the stories come forth, I also have my eye on the aftermath....

Monica Byrne rightly asks the question of the New Yorker editors: “I read that piece and thought: Did no one at @NewYorker think to ask him what ‘I hurt people’ might mean? Fucking really? In this era?”

The word my Puerto Rican mother would use for Junot’s sanitized version of his behavior would be “chickenshit.” He was bold enough to have his #MeToo moment about his victimization, but not about his victimizing. No. The trauma he experienced doesn’t justify or excuse his behavior. It’s unacceptable. Some of it is illegal.

Today is a day to be pissed. To cuss him out in private and in public. To send all our love and solidarity and support to Zinzi and Carmen and Monica, and whoever else will have come out with her story by the time I publish this or the time you read it. I believe women. I support women. I stand up for women.

And.

What about tomorrow? As Katie J. M. Baker asked in her New York Times Opinion piece, “what do we do with these men?”

....

My goal isn’t to drag Junot Diaz, nor is it to excuse him. My goal is to end sexual violence against women and girls. And in order for that to happen, we need to end male domination. If our society weren’t male dominated, males wouldn’t form a hierarchy in which they abused each other, and females wouldn’t be a dumping ground for men’s toxicity and trauma. But as we work toward reorganizing social and political power in the world, we also need men need to heal individually and in groups. And in order for men to heal, they need both compassion and accountability: men need to reconnect with their empathy, and to be accountable for the harm they caused. We need some restorative or transformative justice. Junot Diaz has a lot of apologies to make. Maybe more than he can remember or finish in his lifetime. He should start now. There also need to be spaces of compassion for men who have both harmed and been harmed. The people they victimized shouldn’t be responsible for holding out that compassion. Forgiveness is optional. But I support men having compassionate spaces to heal.

Read the entire essay on Aya de Leon's blog.