Samuel Pepys : Witness to the London Plague

In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary.

“Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.”

During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of time that included a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague in London. Epidemics have always haunted humans, but rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse into one person’s life during a crisis from so long ago.

There were no Zoom meetings, drive-through testing or ventilators in 17th-century London. But Pepys’ diary reveals that there were some striking resemblances in how people responded to the pandemic.

For Pepys and the inhabitants of London, there was no way of knowing whether an outbreak of the plague that occurred in the parish of St. Giles, a poor area outside the city walls, in late 1664 and early 1665 would become an epidemic.

The plague first entered Pepys’ consciousness enough to warrant a diary entry on April 30, 1665: “Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the City,” he wrote, “it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”

Pepys continued to live his life normally until the beginning of June, when, for the first time, he saw houses “shut up” – the term his contemporaries used for quarantine – with his own eyes, “marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there.” After this, Pepys became increasingly troubled by the outbreak.

He soon observed corpses being taken to their burial in the streets, and a number of his acquaintances died, including his own physician.

By mid-August, he had drawn up his will, writing, “that I shall be in much better state of soul, I hope, if it should please the Lord to call me away this sickly time.” Later that month, he wrote of deserted streets; the pedestrians he encountered were “walking like people that had taken leave of the world.”

In London, the Company of Parish Clerks printed “bills of mortality,” the weekly tallies of burials.

Because these lists noted London’s burials – not deaths – they undoubtedly undercounted the dead. Just as we follow these numbers closely today, Pepys documented the growing number of plague victims in his diary.

  

‘Bills of mortality’ were regularly posted. Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Image

At the end of August, he cited the bill of mortality as having recorded 6,102 victims of the plague, but feared “that the true number of the dead this week is near 10,000,” mostly because the victims among the urban poor weren’t counted. A week later, he noted the official number of 6,978 in one week, “a most dreadfull Number.”

By mid-September, all attempts to control the plague were failing. Quarantines were not being enforced, and people gathered in places like the Royal Exchange. Social distancing, in short, was not happening.

He was equally alarmed by people attending funerals in spite of official orders. Although plague victims were supposed to be interred at night, this system broke down as well, and Pepys griped that burials were taking place “in broad daylight.

There are few known effective treatment options for COVID-19. Medical and scientific research need time, but people hit hard by the virus are willing to try anything. Fraudulent treatments, from teas and colloidal silver, to cognac and cow urine, have been floated.

Although Pepys lived during the Scientific Revolution, nobody in the 17th century knew that the Yersinia pestis bacterium carried by fleas caused the plague. Instead, the era’s scientists theorized that the plague was spreading through miasma, or “bad air” created by rotting organic matter and identifiable by its foul smell. Some of the most popular measures to combat the plague involved purifying the air by smoking tobacco or by holding herbs and spices in front of one’s nose.

Tobacco was the first remedy that Pepys sought during the plague outbreak. In early June, seeing shut-up houses “put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell … and chaw.” Later, in July, a noble patroness gave him “a bottle of plague-water” – a medicine made from various herbs. But he wasn’t sure whether any of this was effective. Having participated in a coffeehouse discussion about “the plague growing upon us in this town and remedies against it,” he could only conclude that “some saying one thing, some another.”

During the outbreak, Pepys was also very concerned with his frame of mind; he constantly mentioned that he was trying to be in good spirits. This was not only an attempt to “not let it get to him” – as we might say today – but also informed by the medical theory of the era, which claimed that an imbalance of the so-called humors in the body – blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm – led to disease.

Melancholy – which, according to doctors, resulted from an excess of black bile – could be dangerous to one’s health, so Pepys sought to suppress negative emotions; on Sept. 14, for example, he wrote that hearing about dead friends and acquaintances “doth put me into great apprehensions of melancholy. … But I put off the thoughts of sadness as much as I can.”

 Humans are social animals and thrive on interaction, so it’s no surprise that so many have found social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic challenging. It can require constant risk assessment: How close is too close? How can we avoid infection and keep our loved ones safe, while also staying sane? What should we do when someone in our house develops a cough?

During the plague, this sort of paranoia also abounded. Pepys found that when he left London and entered other towns, the townspeople became visibly nervous about visitors.

“They are afeared of us that come to them,” he wrote in mid-July, “insomuch that I am troubled at it.”

Pepys succumbed to paranoia himself: In late July, his servant Will suddenly developed a headache. Fearing that his entire house would be shut up if a servant came down with the plague, Pepys mobilized all his other servants to get Will out of the house as quickly as possible. It turned out that Will didn’t have the plague, and he returned the next day.

In early September, Pepys refrained from wearing a wig he bought in an area of London that was a hotspot of the disease, and he wondered whether other people would also fear wearing wigs because they could potentially be made of the hair of plague victims.

And yet he was willing to risk his health to meet certain needs; by early October, he visited his mistress without any regard for the danger: “round about and next door on every side is the plague, but I did not value it but there did what I could con ella.”

Just as people around the world eagerly wait for a falling death toll as a sign of the pandemic letting up, so did Pepys derive hope – and perhaps the impetus to see his mistress – from the first decline in deaths in mid-September. A week later, he noted a substantial decline of more than 1,800.

Let’s hope that, like Pepys, we’ll soon see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic. By  Ute Lotz-Heumann. The Conversation , April 24, 2020. 

One of the more curious effects of this pandemic has been the sudden return to cultural relevance of the 17-century naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys. In the week before lockdown, as the public was urged to stay indoors and the newspapers printed disbelieving photographs of rammed parks and high streets, a quote began circulating on Twitter that felt like a warning from history:

On hearing ill rumour that Londoners may soon be urged into their lodgings by Her Majesty’s men, I looked upon the street to see a gaggle of striplings making fair merry, and no doubt spreading the plague well about. Not a care had these rogues for the health of their elders!

– Samuel Pepys, 1664

The quote is fake: there was no “her majesty” during the reign of Charles II, nor was 1664 a bad plague year. Putting those to one side, the hey-nonny flourishes of the language—“a gaggle of striplings make fair merry”—are a far cry from the glinting cut-and-thrust of Pepys’s prose. In fact, the quote came from the Twitter account @pepys_diaries, one of several Pepys impersonations that have sprung up in recent weeks. (Full disclosure: disconcerted as I am to be a part of this sniggering cottage industry, I should admit that I regularly impersonate Pepys for independent magazine the Fence.)

It was a well-intentioned joke, whose authors can’t be blamed for it being shared out of context. In truth, the real Samuel Pepys would likely have been the subject of his fake avatar’s disapproval. With Pepys impersonators suddenly ten-a-penny, it’s worth thinking about how the diarist actually lived when the plague was at its peak.

Nothing pleases us more than seeing our own views in the mouth of a venerated historical figure. We’re not alone in this. Fake authorship is an old and inevitably political game, one that Pepys’s forebears and contemporaries played deftly. One of the most popular books of Pepys’s own youth was the Eikon Basilike, a series of devotional letters and texts that were printed, billed and sold as having been written by Charles I before his execution. Historians doubt Charles is the true author—but under Cromwell’s protectorate the book sold like hot cakes.

Pepys’s plague came in 1665, a descendant of the Black Death, now known as the “great plague of London.” It was the last great British plague epidemic, lasting for over 18 months and killing an estimated 100,000 people. That number feels real again today, as we are warned to expect deaths numbering 20,000 or more.

In September of that year the plague was at its peak. It tore through the country killing more than 5,000 people each week in London alone. But Pepys was thriving like never before. Removed to the safety of the countryside, he was busier than ever: a tailor’s son, elevated by a mixture of chance and merit, well on his way to becoming a dignified man of state.

His entry for the 14th of that month shows him caught between moods, weighing personal security and wellbeing against the death that was all around. He had travelled into the city that day, racked with an all-too-recognisable anxiety:

‘’I did endeavour all I could to talk with as few as I could, there being now no observation of shutting up of houses infected, that to be sure we do converse and meet with people that have the plague.’’

In London he settled his business with great success, securing his goods and advancing his career again. The day, he wrote, gave him “matter for as much content on one hand and melancholy on another” as any day in his life. In a bravura passage, he went on to describe the effects of the plague in the city. He had seen corpses carried close by him on their way to be buried; he discovered that someone had been dying of the plague at an inn when he was there.

“To hear that poor Payne, my waiter, hath buried a child, and is dying himself. To hear that a labourer I sent but the other day to Dagenhams to know how they did there, is dead of the plague; and that one of my own watermen, that carried me daily, fell sick as soon as he had landed me on friday morning past, when I had been all night upon the water […] and is now dead of the plague.”

Here we can see Pepys wrestling with the way epidemics invert our normal intuitions about the opposition between public and private concern. Each victim is to be pitied, but each is also a potential threat. The closer someone is, the more dangerous they become. This can be awkward: before he fled to the countryside, Pepys had found himself among people so anxious about the disease that he had to lie about where he lived. Conversely, many of us are now wrestling with the counter-intuitive notion that the most public-spirited thing to do may be simply looking after ourselves.

At the end of that year, Pepys took stock of the great catastrophe in a typically un-self-deceived fashion: “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time, by my Lord Brouncker’s and Captain Cocke’s good company… and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I was willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings.”

This is the other surprise: Pepys’s was a social plague, full of meetings, dancing and drinking. He regularly slept at his friends’ houses throughout the epidemic, and never gave up his merriment—or his unsavoury womanising. What Pepys’s diaries record, in time of plague and out of it, is the busy particularity of our daily lives: their abundant small pleasures and casual fellowships. The day after his trip to London, Pepys was happily beavering away at his office. In the evening he went for a medicinal drink with a companion. The day after that, he was at lunch with three friends, “and very merry we were.” With our own peak still to come, we can’t expect the same pleasures for some time.

How Samuel Pepys really dealt with the plague. By John Phipps.  Prospect  , April 2, 2020.

Samuel Pepys was always better at social than distancing. At the end of 1665, after bubonic plague had taken off a quarter of London’s population, he wrote in his diary: “I have never lived so merrily . . . as I have done this plague time.”

By December the great tide of death had abated but even as it had swept in months earlier, Pepys wrote of “the greatest glut of content that ever I had”, adding, almost as an afterthought, “only under some difficulty because of the plague”. He was a prosperous government official, member of the Navy Board during a maritime war with the Dutch; treasurer of the English colony at Tangier.

While Pepys had sent his wife downriver to Woolwich to escape the disease, he remained in London and continued to visit taverns and flirt his way through the evenings. He took what he thought were precautions, chewing tobacco and forgoing new wigs lest they be cut from the head of an infected body. On one occasion, “I met a dead corpse of the plague in the narrow alley . . . but I thank God I was not much disturbed at it.”

But in the last week of August, more than 6,000 had died from the plague and Pepys’ imperviousness to melancholy was under strain. The few people he saw, he wrote, looked as if they had “taken leave of the world”. He moved amid Buriers and Searchers, often elderly women assigned the dangerous job of examining the dead for signs of the plague, carrying long white wands to warn people to keep their distance as they went about their gloomy work. It was getting closer. His physician and the waterman who ferried him daily had both died, and Pepys decided to make a will.

His more austere friend, also a diarist, John Evelyn, Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen, as well as for prisoners of war (many incarcerated in deathtrap confinement at Dover), looked on the ghastly spectacle in early September with a more tragic eye. Walking from Borough on the south side of the Thames to St James’s was “a dismal passage and dangerous to see so many coffins exposed in the streets, now thin of people; the shops shut up, and all in mournful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next”.

Even in a statistically minded age (both were fellows of the newly founded Royal Society), Pepys and Evelyn knew that the vanishing act they were witnessing could not just be measured by the body count of the Mortality Bills. It was the city itself that was perishing, deprived of the oxygen of sociability.

Pepys took it hard when one of his favourite taverns, The Angell on Tower Hill, in common with many others, closed. He and many like him exemplified Aristotle’s conviction that humans are, above all else, social animals; and that the vital energy of cities in particular comes from gatherings — in public squares, theatres, sports stadiums — where, through some collective elixir of attentive enthusiasm, individuals are lifted by the (not invariably) benign excitement of the crowd.

Take that away and what you were left with were buildings and the fearfully confined inside them. And what Pepys, in his reckless way, was determined to hold on to was that other basic cell of community, beyond individuals and family — friendship.

A succession of writers from antiquity onwards celebrated friendship as the most life-enhancing social relationship of all.

The poet Horace’s friendship with his wealthy patron Maecenas was the wellspring of some of his most affecting verse. Cicero was at pains to distinguish the real thing — voluntary and entered into for nothing other than its own intrinsic pleasure — from sensuality that could wither along with the exhaustion of lust, or connections based on utility.

The great essayist Michel de Montaigne went into deep grief at the loss of his friend Étienne de la Boétie and lamented in an essay on friendship that there was “no action or imagination of mine wherein I do not miss him”.

And because, according to these champions of amity, disinterested friendship was intrinsically virtuous, it was the primary building block of strong societies; the place where personal pleasure and the common good nourished each other.

Acts of friendship were and are among the most painful casualties of epidemics. The earliest and most gripping account of plague, given by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, describes “dejection of mind” as its greatest misery, brought on by the fracturing of friendship. Those who visited the sick knew they were inviting a death sentence on themselves. But those who had no visitors “died forlorn”.

Our generation of the plagued is more fortunate. For once, the grotesque debasement of what it means to be befriended on social media has something going for it. FaceTime, Skype, Instagram and Zoom allow comforting visits to the sick and distressed in ways denied to Thucydides’ stricken Athenians or Pepys’ Londoners walled in, as they were, behind the red cross daubed on their doors.

Since the appearance of a whole slew of books on the subject, beginning with Hans Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History (read at college half a century ago), William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, it’s become a commonplace that epidemics are the great re-setters of history, more formative even than wars or revolutions. The lack of immunity of indigenous American peoples to the lethal diseases brought by European conquistadors in the 16th century was unquestionably decisive in their defeat and subjugation.

But the pandemic of 1918, horrifying as it was, did little to affect political and social alterations already made by the war. And some things remained constant before, during and after the plague, notably the starkly differing experiences of rich and poor.

A standard feature of the “Dances of Death” imagery that became popular after the arrival of the Black Death in Europe in 1348 was the indifference of the plague to rank, wealth and authority, indiscriminately mowing down popes and emperors at the height of their powers, along with peasants and beggars.

But it’s equally true that if you had the means to escape the urban hotspots of infection, you had a much better chance of survival than if you were stuck in the urban swarm. The ancestors of today’s escapees to New York summer homes were panic-stricken passengers in coaches and private carriages jamming the exits from the city when the first big wave of cholera struck in 1832.

While the epidemics differ in their origins, virulence and duration, and while the understanding of how they arise and in what form they are carried has changed dramatically over the centuries, to a remarkable degree the social danse macabre following the shock of impact has stayed much the same. It’s a square dance along a quadrilateral formed by political power, economic desperation, religious fervour and medical understanding. Each of those institutional communities does what it can to minimise the damage to their authority. But what happens when they interact is less predictable.

The first reaction of western rulers whose best-laid plans are frustrated by epidemic has been, almost invariably, to blame Asians and to adopt the blustery vocabulary of war. There is, in fact, a dramatic founding history behind this militarisation of medical crisis. In 1346, Genoese merchants and soldiers had locked themselves inside the Crimean fortress city of Caffa (now Feodosia) to defend themselves against a siege by the Mongol army of Jani Beg.

 Before they could press their advantage of numbers, the besiegers were struck down by a brutal wave of bubonic plague, a contagion which had been endemic along the Silk Road for at least 20 years.

According to Gabriele de Mussi of Piacenza, who probably wrote his account two years later, “the dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster . . . ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside”. What seemed like “mountains of dead” were thrown into the city.

This was the earliest documented act of biological warfare and, according to de Mussi’s narrative, the Black Death subsequently travelled to Christian Europe through survivors of the siege. In fact, it was likelier that the Genoese carried the disease in the hold of their ships, where fleas living on the bodies of black rats were the carriers of the fatal bacillus. But the history established the notion, still current in the Trumpian branding of coronavirus as “Wuhan” or “Chinese”, that somehow the epidemic is a tool of ruthless oriental strategy.

The hitherto unknown strain of cholera that ravaged the world in the 19th century originated in British-controlled Bengal in 1817, and may have been carried west on European steam shipping. By the end of that century, however, it was not uncommon to refer to cholera as an Asiatic act of revenge for the humiliations of imperial domination.

If scapegoating was always going to be a predictable response of plague-beleaguered powers, the inevitable target of blame was the Jews. At the time of the Black Death, they were accused in some places of poisoning wells; in others it was said that they had introduced the disease out of sheer malevolence towards Christians.

The consequences, even by the standards of persecution endemic in the medieval Christian world, were horrific. From Spain to the Rhineland, in Switzerland and Bavaria, Jews were the victims of massacre and, very often, burnings alive. In Strasbourg, 2,000 were slaughtered; in Basel, 130 children were separated from their parents before 600 adults were burnt. In the single village of Tàrrega in Catalonia, virtually the entire community of 300 Jews were killed by assault or burning.

Other times, other epidemics, found other victims. Outbreaks of cholera in American cities such as Boston and New York were blamed on the immigrants, most often Irish, who of necessity were packed together in insanitary conditions. The nativist Know-Nothing movement was fired up by attacking Irish migrants as a double threat to Protestant Anglo-America; as the carriers of both popery and disease.

John Pintard, one of the founders of the New-York Historical Society, who remained in the city through the 1832 epidemic, believed the infection would of itself purify the population and act as a prophylactic against future outbreaks harming the better sort of people. “Those sickened must be cured or die off,” he wrote, “and being chiefly of the very scum of the city, the quicker [their] dispatch, the sooner the malady will cease.”

The pious and the powerful often, but not invariably, held up their hands in horror. Pope Clement VI forbade attacks on Jews and insisted that since they had suffered at least equally if not more seriously than Christians from the plague, why would they be responsible for their own suffering? But it suited other authorities to let popular hatred run its course along with the infection; just as the better off and the better educated were sometimes prepared to endorse the idea that immigrants were, by the very fact of their arrival and lodging in crowded quarters, tantamount to an invasion force armed with disease. Better that outsiders should be blamed.

Nonetheless, the powerful did not escape blame for the calamity. If the plague was commonly believed to be God’s punishment for the sins of egregious wealth, debauchery and overweening pride, popular preaching held the stewards of both church and state to be complicit in these transgressions. Humility and self-mortification were needed. Processions of flagellants, hundreds in number, made their way through cities including Florence, thrashing their bodies with metal-studded flails, in bloody reproof of bishops and abbots.

Painting and tomb sculpture brought the warnings of the dead into the world of the living. “Transi” tombs placed sculptures of decaying cadavers lying immediately beneath the grander likenesses of the deceased. In the Campo Santo cemetery at Pisa, Francesco Traini’s terrifying “Triumph of Death” (painted before 1348), in which grandly dressed types beheld open coffins containing corpses in various states of decomposition, took on freshly urgent meaning.

In the midst of calamity, economics was always at loggerheads with the interests of public health. Even though, until there was an understanding of germ-borne diseases, the plague was mostly attributed to “foul air” and noxious vapours said to arise from stagnant or polluted marshes, there was nonetheless a sense that the very commercial arteries that had generated prosperity were now transformed into vectors of poison.

But when quarantines were proposed or imposed (an invention of the same northern Italian towns and ports that have suffered most brutally from our own pandemic), those who stood to lose most, merchants and in some places artisans and workers, from the stoppage of markets, fairs and trade, put up stiff resistance.

Must the economy die so that it could be resurrected in robust good health? Yes, said the guardians of public health, who became part of urban life in Europe from the 15th century onwards.

When the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in western Europe appeared in Marseille in 1720, the regent, Philippe of Orleans, not renowned for his public-spiritedness, appointed one of his generals, Charles de Langeron, to take command of the emergency, put a quarter of the royal army at his disposal, established a “Council of Health” in Provence, and shut down travel and trade between the port and towns like Aix, Montpellier and Arles.

Not all of the prophylactic remedies were of much avail. Plague walls were built to prevent the entry of travellers to provincial towns such as Aix and Arles, but the disease penetrated the cities nonetheless. The crew of the ship thought to have brought the plague were confined to a lazaretto offshore, more or less guaranteeing mass mortality. And a general massacre of cats and dogs was no help at all. But de Langeron was praised for being publicly conspicuous in the hotspots, “on his horse from morning till night . . . scornful of danger, to remedy ills that seemed insurmountable”, and compared to the most virtuous consuls of antiquity.

In the long term, the idea that state and local governments should, as part of their brief, become specialised institutions for public health, which in times of pestilence would gather reliable information on the source of infection and be able to map its spread as a precondition of remedial policy, was a crucial legacy.

Which is not to say that empirical science always has its way in its toils with piety, profit and power. Even though the physician John Snow conclusively traced back the cholera infection of 1854 to those who had used a single water fountain at Broad Street in Soho, and established that the water company servicing that pump had been using dangerously tainted water from the sewage-riddled gunk of the Thames, his principal argument that the disease was conveyed in faecally polluted water took a while to be accepted.

  

For some time now, the cult of the individual and the hollowing out of government, the better to strip away any impediments to the optimisation of profit, has been riding high. The global trauma of the pandemic may well move things in the opposite direction, towards a greater acceptance of government intervention, a trend which can either become baleful — as it already has in the illiberal authoritarianism just instituted in Hungary — or benign, with policy, both preventive and reactive, based on the authority of knowledge.

And there is something else, evident in much of the public response in this time of profound distress, which may yet arise from the ashes of our complacency, and that is the quality most important to Adam Smith (sometimes misunderstood as the high priest of individualism), which in The Theory of Moral Sentiments he called “sympathy”.

However selfish man be supposed, he wrote, “there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others . . . That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane . . . The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”

In the pit of our common trepidation, we must hope he is right.

Plague time: Simon Schama on what history tells us. The Financial Times , April 10, 2020. 

Women for Trump and E. Jean Carroll on Hideous Men

                                                          Ivanka and Melania Trump

At the end of the second week of April, Women for Trump, an auxiliary arm of the Trump campaign, hosted another of its trademark “Hour to Empower” sessions to rally the female faithful. In keeping with traditions that the newly housebound have adopted since the coronavirus pandemic dropped on the country with its full force, the women broadcasted from home. The president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, served as the de facto host for GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox, and Ben Carson’s daughter-in-law Merlynn Carson, who all appeared on a screen split into quadrants. ‘

“We are so fortunate to have a wartime president to lead us through this global challenge!” Lara Trump announced from the upper left corner of the screen, a blueish potted plant over her right shoulder, giant glass candelabra over her left. Carson praised the recently passed stimulus package to the heavens. Collectively, they discussed how “most Democrat governors” have shown their gratitude to Trump during the crisis, with the exception of Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, the ingrate who was “politicizing in time of crisis.” They concluded with some banter about how they’re handling all their home time.

Veteran viewers of the “Hour to Empower” might have experienced it all as a wan attempt at keeping up appearances during the president’s crisis year. It hardly matched the optimistic fervor of the last edition, which took place in Sandy Springs, Georgia, and featured red-clad White House allies Kimberly Guilfoyle and Katrina Pierson regaling a roomful of Peachtree State women about the president’s ability to keep the economy humming. Guilfoyle and Pierson drew the loudest applause from the assembled by enthusing about the number of federal judges Trump had already appointed—judges who, it needed no reminding, were vetted for their extreme anti-choice positions.

Women for Trump have always proclaimed that no matter how misogynistic Trump appears to be, no matter how many women have accused him of abuse, and no matter that he supports policies to abolish women’s liberty, he is in fact “empowering” women. In fairness, “empowerment” is one of those famously flexible terms—akin to that other right-wing go-to word, “liberty”—that’s strayed far from its original meaning. But for these women, theirs is a hobbled empowerment, literally and figuratively. 

The damage done to women by the Trump administration has been incalculable, the disempowerment immense. In office, he has set women back decades both politically and through policies aimed at limiting their rights and autonomy. He has promoted hundreds of anti-choice judges, mostly male and white, including two to the Supreme Court. He has encouraged toxic masculinity in his supporters, and pushed for anti-woman policies at every level of government, from the Department of Education to Health and Human Services. And Trump’s election, after the most openly misogynistic campaign in modern history, convinced most Democratic Party regulars that American women were unelectable to the highest office in the land for at least another cycle. 

If Trump can be said to “empower” women at all, it is in the same way that he empowers the women closest to him, promoting them as commodities; as deal enhancers. Trump’s wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law must resemble in style and stature the thousands of women this impresario of female flesh has lined up beside himself for years in his beauty pageants and reality television escapades. They must choose his favorite shoe and relinquish their right to run.

The “empowered” Trump women part ways with non-Trump women in a number of ways. They do not give lip service to other women’s rights, because in their Hobbesian view of the world, everyone gets ahead “on her own.”  They have an unusually strong tolerance for hypocrisy. White women for Trump put him over the top in 2016, apparently unconcerned with the October surprise of a hot mic tape in which Trump bragged about sexual assault, which in turn opened the floodgates to what are now more than 40 accusations of sexual misconduct, up to and including rape. Last year, Trump was the presidential candidate with the largest number of donations from women, with women constituting 41 percent of his donors.

The Trump women’s willingness to submit to abuse goes along with their willingness to participate in the commodification of the feminine. Female flesh is a marketing tool with which to hawk everything from cars to music to movies. Many women already participate in this trade, with Anna Wintour at one end of the spectrum and Stormy Daniels at the other. Trump and his women emerged from this world.

Branding women has been his avocation. He opened his “T Model” agency at a time when model industry practices were just a few legalities removed from human trafficking. Jeffrey Epstein is not the only one of Trump’s running buddies to be credibly accused of pedophilia. Trump not only attended parties for aspiring models, many of them underage girls; he hosted them, on his yacht and in halls at his hotel in New York. The goal of all the New York “modelizers” was to interact sexually with as many nubile out-of-towners as physically possible. Ambitious, disoriented young girls would submit to, if they were lucky, just a thorough ogling or manhandling; and if unlucky, rape.

Loyalty and discretion are the two chief job qualifications required for anyone to rise in Trumpworld, but especially so for women intimately connected to him, who might be familiar with whatever really lies behind the orange mask and coif de greffe de cheveux. The supposed empowerment of Trump women has been amplified by access journalists, whose work routinely normalizes daughter Ivanka and wife Melania as political figures. Ivanka plays the media like a fiddle, carefully choosing outlets—The Financial Times, The Washington Post—for rare interviews, but mostly appearing on the Fox News Channel or remaining silent. The more guarded Melania forces journalists to become adept at “reading” her fashion choices—choices that really are one man’s full time job. One CNN reporter assigned to the FLOTUS beat has speculated that Melania’s habitual look of steely suffering is not a reflection of the inner torment of a woman in a transactional relationship with an oleaginous obese oaf, but rather a cultural holdover from her Slovenian youth, where “a non-genuine smile isn’t really a thing.”

No one masks Trump’s malevolence toward women more effectively than his “empowered” female clone, Ivanka. In her senior adviser role she traipses around the world collecting the home numbers of corporate and political leaders (need those numbers on hand if Dad goes to jail) all while spewing bromides about women’s empowerment at ridiculous events like February’s Dubai women’s conference, held just days before a British court accused the Dubai sheikh of kidnapping and torturing his own adult daughters.

Ivanka came of professional age along with what Sheelah Kolhatkar has dubbed the “Women’s Empowerment Industrial Complex.” The lucrative seminar circuit flies brand-name speakers around the world to join panels of mic’ed up, well-heeled women sitting on stage couches, to talk for 45 minutes about “networking” or breaking the glass ceiling. Empowered with a few new contacts, they part ways and return to jobs where they mostly serve The Man until the next first class ticket to the next seminar.

The ideal “empowered” Trump Woman is the “entrepreneur,” the go-it-alone girl-boss who’s palatable to corporate America; a job-creator who can save the American masses from their deaths of despair.  Last week, Trump told business leaders that Ivanka had created 15 million jobs. As with all his brazen lies, that number was snatched from the ether. In November, he had credited her with creating 14 million jobs, so perhaps he’s rounding up as a bit of coronavirus crisis management. Meanwhile, the American economy only added 6.2 million jobs during Trump’s presidency.

While it’s long been the fever dream of the Beltway media that she’ll be a “moderating influence,” one will never find Ivanka correcting Dad. She is smart enough to understand that Trump’s base could care less about the facts. It is increasingly unlikely that she will be the daughter who will bring down the father, as Steve Bannon once predicted. The Republican wet dream now is that Ivanka becomes the first female president, and that the Trump dynasty lasts 16 years in office.

Melania is the other model of empowerment for the Women for Trump who, like her, are commonly accused of being complicit. But compliance must take root before complicity may flourish, and those close to Donald pay a price in loneliness and public humiliation. Most Boomer women who encounter men like him have learned how to navigate away with smiles, the brushings-away of groping hands, the deft changing of a subject of conversation. These are the many tricks of female subservience. They conduct business, and then—usually—get the hell out.

Shortly after the disastrous midterm election, which put her golden-egg laying goose in jeopardy of impeachment and the prospect of prison, Melania emerged from the shadows as her own power source, demanding the sacking of deputy national security advisor Mira Ricardel. That firing, granted the day after the request, was Melania’s first public act—beyond her infamous decision to wear her “i really don’t care do u” jacket to visit migrant children, and the slap-away of Donald’s hand on an Israeli tarmac—viral moments that consumed many hours of media attention nonetheless. Her real power play came a few months later, when Trump installed Melania’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham as White House press secretary, despite the fact that her prior experience had been limited to staffing state legislators in Arizona. Grisham had proved her utility to Trumpworld during Melania’s mysterious 24-day disappearance after what was supposedly a simple outpatient kidney procedure. Grisham distinguished herself by holding zero daily briefings during her tenure—a feat no standard-issue political flack of lesser grit would have dared attempt.

Trump’s evangelical base long ago forgave Melania her lesbian nude modeling shoot, her lolling nude on a fake Oval Office rug, and her donning S&M garb, because all of it went to embellish Donald’s brand. The religious right now calls her a “Proverbs 31 wife”—Bible-code for submissive and virtuous women. Now, from the East Wing, with its new glam room and Pilates gym, Melania has also managed her public profile as a human clothes hanger, forever sending what many still believe to be messages through her choice of attire.

These days, Melania is reaping the rewards that can come with this hobbled empowerment. Long gone are the days when Donald could discard a pretty young wife with a million-dollar payoff, as he did with Second Wife Marla Maples. Donald is today, by comparison to then, a slave to his hot “supermodel.” He is entirely dependent upon her continued willingness to accessorize him. And he has grown obedient under her occult power, as old men with young wives do. Trump has even “joked” that Melania wouldn’t care if he died. At a fundraiser for wounded Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise, Trump marveled at the way Scalise’s wife had cried at the hospital. “I mean not many wives would react that way to tragedy, I know mine wouldn’t,” he said.

Trump’s notion of an empowered woman may be severely restricted, but through that cracked lens, Trump lives with his own peculiar fears. “Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. “The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naive or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part.”

                                                     Martha Nussbaum

As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has noted, disgust is a foundational element of misogyny. Germaphobe Trump is horrified by female bodily functions, especially menstruation and childbirth (pregnancy is OK—it makes breasts grow), which likely explains why he fled into the arms of a plastic-fantastic porn star and Playboy bunny immediately after Melania produced Barron. Like the Hebrew ascetics who wrote the Bible, and the African shamans who ban menstruating women from villages, and his own father, Trump is infected with the ancient patriarchal belief that women’s natural functions are taboo. For Trump, the trouble with modern women is that you can never know when these female killers will have blood coming out of their “wherever.”

But the Women for Trump have adapted. They’ve learned to work within this foundational misogyny. The best of them, like Melania, possess a level of intense self-discipline and isolated rigor, a faux empowerment that betters the odds that the wager they’ve made will pay off eventually. In exchange, the patriarchy has much to offer; for a chosen few, it always has.

Trump’s Women Are Trapped in a Cult of “Empowerment”. By  Nina Burleigh. The New Republic,

 April 13 ,2020. 

                                                                    Lana Trump 

Republican campaign officials are deploying targeted marketing techniques to identify where undecided female voters will have the greatest impact in the 2020 election, amid warning signs that parts of the crucial bloc are abandoning the president.

President Donald Trump carried non-college-educated white women — 20% of all voters in presidential election years — by 27 points in 2016. But the group shifted by 13 points in the 2018 midterm elections, and in recent months warmed to the prospect of impeaching and removing Trump from office over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate a domestic political rival.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are responding with an aggressive organizational effort to shore up these voters.

“We’ve talked a lot about how we’re a data-driven campaign,” said Hannah Castillo, director of coalitions for the Trump campaign. “We are all over the country where we’re doing these events.”

The campaign launched its Women for Trump group last year and says it has attracted 30,000 members ever since. Out of all of its “coalition” events targeting individual subgroups — including veterans, Latinos, evangelical Christians and African Americans — 63% have been held for women voters.

But it is unclear whether the campaign is making progress, as polls show growing disapproval of Trump among white working class women and suburban women — two critical subgroups in the upcoming general election.

“The share of the white working class in the industrial states are where we need to look to see if we’re going to have major, consequential gaps going forward,” said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on American public opinion. “It’s clear that something’s happening, that there’s a division.”

The RNC is planning a host of “Women Empowerment Days” in various states throughout the country, hoping to engage wider networks of female voters.

The Trump campaign and RNC are both using “Designated Market Area” research — often used in advertising to target consumers based on geographical metadata — to identify undecided communities.

“When we have a Women for Trump event, it’s obviously in substantial turf for target DMA where we see women can be impactful in those target states,” a campaign official said.

Democratic super PAC Priorities USA released polling this fall that found Trump “under water” in key battleground states with white women — and specifically with white non-college-educated women, of which 45% approved of his job performance, while 55% disapproved.

“His overall numbers have been stable — low, but stable. But within these groups, there’s been some movement,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and CEO of the Mellman Group. “There is no question that women are much more hostile to this president than men — there’s no question that college-educated women are particularly hostile. But there’s been movement among non-college-educated women, as well. He’s suffered some meaningful defections from his high points.”

Trump campaign officials look at the entirety of the women vote and express optimism.

“We hear a lot about women, women, women,” said a second senior campaign official.

Drawing on polling from NBC and the Wall Street Journal, the official compared Trump’s current approval among women, 37% nationally, to exit polling in 2016, in which 41% of women supported the president.

That difference, within the average margin of polling error, has given the campaign a “quiet confidence” its numbers have remained consistent — despite signs that suggest Trump faces growing problems among white working class women, a pillar of his political base.

Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and senior advisor, said the Women for Trump group is based on a loose concept from 2016.

“After the president was inaugurated, and we had time to really focus on getting things set up the right way for this campaign, something we talked about was very early on rolling out our coalitions, so that we could do things the right way this time,” she said.

She said half of the campaign’s donations come from women. The number cannot be independently checked because the campaign is not required to disclose donors who give under $200 and it does not voluntarily provide itemized information for many of those supporters to the Federal Elections Commission.

At the end of September, the time of the last available donation tally, the Center for Responsive Politics found that women who gave more than $200 provided 34.7% of Trump’s campaign cash. They accounted for 43.9% of recorded donors.

The president’s campaign team says it is investing the money in states like New Hampshire and Minnesota that Trump barely lost in his first election. The outreach to women is in line with their goal to win those close contests in 2020.

That strategy was aimed at winning states he lost in 2016, rather than worries about losing women voters. “I don’t know that it’s that we’re concerned about women,” Lara Trump told McClatchy in an interview.

“Of course, strategically we’re targeting areas that we know we have to win,” she said.

Jessie Jane Duff, a Women for Trump advisory board member, said many of the events she attends on behalf of the group are at the invitation of organizations not directly affiliated with the campaign.

“It’s like all of these coalitions, that we’re demonstrating that there are active voices out there that are supporting this president from every demographic group, because the left have labeled us as a bunch of ignorant white people,” she said. “That’s not a label that any campaign or president should be just sitting there and ignoring.”

Duff and other women supporters of Trump who spoke to McClatchy said they believed that some people who might publicly say they don’t support Trump, vote for him at the ballot box.

Amy Kremer, a conservative activist who runs a political action committee aimed at increasing support from women for Trump, told McClatchy that women frequently show their support for the president in subtle ways such as a thumbs up when she’s traveling in pro-Trump gear.

“Do you know how many people tell me pollsters call their house and they lie to them, because they don’t want people to know how much they love Donald Trump?” she said.

Kremer said the women are “afraid of the backlash” they would receive for backing Trump publicly. She said she expects women who backed Trump in 2016 to vote for him again in 2020. She identified the economy and health care as the two issues most important to women.

In their research, the campaign and RNC have also identified those as motivating policy issues for women voters who support Trump. Education also tops the list.

Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy and politics at the left-aligned Third Way, said the think tank’s battleground state polling also reflects education, the economy and health care as top priorities. She said congressional Democrats who beat their Republican opponents in the midterm elections with the help of women focused on baseline economic issues.

                                                            Lanae Erickson

Based on the president’s approval rating among women, “It’s hard to picture any woman who didn’t vote for Donald Trump the first time voting for him,” Erickson said.

“He’s not picking up any new female voters,” she said. “Spending a lot of money to shore women up shows that they know that and they’re trying to hold the ones they got the first time.“

Erickson added, “But I just think that Trump is not doing anything to appeal to swing women at this point, he’s just trying not to hemorrhage as many as possible.”

Specific reforms that have found an advocate in the president’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, provide the campaign with some identifiable policy victories. The administration supported a provision of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act that included paid family leave for federal workers.

“President Trump is delivering on his promises with his policies benefiting women across the country,” Allie Carroll, the RNC’s assistant national press secretary, said. “With near record-low unemployment for women, paid family leave for federal workers, and a doubling of the child tax credit, women are winning across America and they will play a crucial role in ensuring that the success of the Trump administration continues for four more years.”

Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at EMILY’s List, a groups that supports female candidates who back abortion rights, said that Democratic candidates tend to hold positions that are more in line with women’s views on the issues that turn out voters.

Reynolds said that Trump’s advertising may not mention issues that will deter women from voting for him, “So it will be our job to go out, offer our own agenda and to point out where they’re getting it wrong.”

Trump’s data operation is targeting women voters amid warning signs. By Michael Wilner and Francesca Chambers.  McClatchy DC , January 9, 2020.

                                                       E. Jean Carroll

My first rich boy pulled down my underpants. My last rich boy pulled down my tights. My first rich boy — I had fixed my eyes on his face long enough to know — was beautiful, with dark gray eyes and long golden-brown hair across his forehead. I don’t know what he grew up to be. My last rich boy was blond. He grew up to be the president of the United States.

The first rich boy’s name was James. He was raped by his grandfather. He was raped by his uncles. He was beaten by his father. My mother told me the stories much later. When James was 6, he was taken away from his father and given to a rich couple, Arthur and Evelyn. Arthur and Evelyn were best friends with my parents, Tom and Betty. One day my parents gave a party. Everyone brought their kids. Arthur and Evelyn drove up from Indianapolis with James to the redbrick schoolhouse where we lived, deep in the hills north of Fort Wayne. As the parents drank cocktails in our big yard with the scent of the blooming wads of cash infusing every inch of Indiana just after WWII, the kids played up on the hill beside the schoolhouse.

James was 7 and a half or 8, a bloodthirsty, beautiful, relentless boy. He ordered everyone around, even the older kids. To me he said, “I’m going to shove this up you again.”

We’d played this game before. Our families had gone on a camping trip to Pokagon State Park, and I learned that an object could be shoved up the place where I tinkled. I don’t remember now what it was, probably a stick, or maybe a rock. It felt like being cut with a knife. I remember I bled.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

We were standing on the hill. James looked at me with his feral gray eyes.

He wadded up a piece of fabric — it was a light blue-violet shade and looked fluffy, like a bunched-up hairnet.

“Put this in your underpants,” he said.

He pulled up my dress and crammed the balled-up material down my pants. Late at night, when the guests had gone home, I took off my dress, pulled down my pants. And there it still was, the wadded-up thing.

James and I played so many ferocious games while camping that summer: hooking each other with fishhooks, holding each other underwater, tying each other up, shooting each other with cap guns, chasing each other with garter snakes, dumping hot embers on each other’s heads. I am not putting him on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List — whether he belongs there is for him to decide. It is

his uncles, his father, his grandfather who belong on such a list.

Now, about this Most Hideous Men of My Life List: It is a list of the 21 most revolting scoundrels I have ever met. I started it in October 2017, the day Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their Harvey Weinstein bombshells in the New York Times. As the riotous, sickening stories of #MeToo surged across the country, I, like many women, could not help but be reminded of certain men in my own life. When I began, I was not sure which among all the foul harassers, molesters, traducers, swindlers, stranglers, and no-goods I’ve known were going to make the final accounting. I considered Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, and the giant dingleberry Charlie Rose, all guys whose TV shows I was on many times and who made headlines during the rise of #MeToo. But in the end, they do not make my Hideous List.

Hunter S. Thompson … now, there’s a good candidate. I know. I wrote his biography. Does Hunter, the greatest degenerate of his generation, who kept yelling, “Off with your pants!” as he sliced the leggings from my body with a long knife in his hot tub, make the list? Naw.

And if having my pants hacked off by a man lit to the eyebrows with acid, Chivas Regal, Champagne, grass, Chartreuse, Dunhills, cocaine, and Dove Bars does not make the list — because to me there is a big difference between an “adventure” and an “attack” — who, in God’s name, does make my Hideous List?

After almost two years of drawing and redrawing my list, I’ve come to realize that, though my hideosity bar is high, my criteria are a little cockeyed. It is a gut call. I am like Justice Potter Stewart. I just know a hideous man when I see one. And I have seen plenty. For 26 years, I have been writing the “Ask E. Jean” column in Elle, and for 26 years, no matter what problems are driving women crazy — their careers, wardrobes, love affairs, children, orgasms, finances — there comes a line in almost every letter when the cause of the correspondent’s quagmire is revealed. And that cause is men.

Viz.: the man who thinks 30 seconds of foreplay is “enough,” the man who cheats on his wife, the man who passes women over for promotion, the man who steals his girlfriend’s credit cards, the man who keeps 19 guns in the basement, the man who tells his co-worker she “talks too much in meetings,” the man who won’t bathe, the man who beats his girlfriend’s dog, the man who takes his female colleagues’ ideas, the man who tries to kill his rich wife by putting poison in her shampoo. Every woman, whether consciously or not, has a catalogue of the hideous men she’s known.

As it turns out, a Hideous Man marks practically every stage of my life. And so, Reader, from this cavalcade of 21 assholes, I am selecting a few choice specimens. One or two may not be pleasant for you to read about, I apologize. But if we all just lean over and put our heads between our knees, the fainting feeling will pass. No one need be carried from the room.

When I entered Indiana University, I was the most boy-crazy 17-year-old in the nation.

If you’d met me my freshman year, you would never have imagined I was born to be an advice columnist. But imagine it now. Thirteen miles from the Bloomington campus, there I am: young Jeanie Carroll, driving with a boy down a hilly back road in Brown County State Park, where IU students go on October Sundays to supposedly look at the famous leaves.

My situation in life — my father being a Beta Theta Pi from Wabash College, my mother being a Kappa Delta from UCLA, my wild wish to pledge either Pi Beta Phi or Kappa Kappa Gamma, my rah-rah disposition, my total ignorance of what is going on in the world, the fact that I never crack a book — all are equally against my becoming a columnist, the first requirement of which is acknowledging that there are other beings on the planet besides boys.

How I end up in that car, who the boy is … well, I don’t remember. I’ve been looking through my 1961 datebook, and each day is so chock-full of the names of boys who called me, the names of boys whom I expected to call me and didn’t, the names of boys who did call me but I didn’t care if they called me, the names of boys who if they didn’t call me I was never going to speak to again, the names of boys who if they called me I would not pick up the phone, and the names of boys I would have my roommate, Connie, call and ask if they called me while she was on the line with a boy who was begging me to call him back, I can’t figure out who this boy is. But meet No. 1 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List.

He belongs to that class of boys who are not athletes and so must make their mark on campus with their devastating looks or gobs of money. I don’t remember this boy having either. I remember this boy’s thing is his car. It is a stick shift. Nobody knows how to “drive a stick,” he says, except him and A. J. Foyt, the Indianapolis 500 winner, and so I am amazed when he releases the clutch like he’s stepping on a yellow-jacket nest and grinds the gears when he pulls over in the dirt and stops.

I look around. “I gotta get back to the dorm,” I say.

He turns off the engine.

“Youuuuuuuu liiiitttttttttllllllllllll prrrrrrrrrrrrik teeeeeeeeeeez,” he says. This opening compliment, “You little prick tease,” is paid to every girl at some point or other in 1961, and I don’t wait to be paid another. I open the car door and slide out.

What am I wearing? Tennis shoes, jeans, big sweatshirt, and — blam, he lunges from the car and bolts his arms around me. We crash, like felled trees, to the ground.

We land in grass covered in yellow leaves. Thanks to Mr. Weber, my high-school biology teacher, I can, with 100 percent confidence, say those yellow leaves are poplar leaves. They crackle as I struggle to get up.

Straddling me, the boy looks zonked out of his mind with the possibilities. He pushes my sweatshirt up to my neck.

I remember the thought flashes through my mind that could I have foreseen the circumstance of a boy throwing me down and pushing my sweatshirt up to my chin, I would not have worn a padded bra. A padded bra makes a girl look like she lacks something.

“I don’t want to wrestle,” I say. “Get off!”

He pins my arms over my head by my wrists.

“Get off!” I say again.

He is holding my wrists with both his hands, and, before I can react, he changes his hold to one hand and, with his free hand, pulls a knife out of his back pocket.

“See this?” he whispers.

I look at it. At the time, I own two Girl Scout knives, a Girl Scout knife-safety certificate, and my own personal hatchet, and the neighbor kids believe I have reached a height of felicity rarely attained on Illsley Place, our street, because of my winning 30 rounds of mumblety-peg, a game where we throw pocketknives at each other’s bare feet. So, yes, I can “see” his knife. It’s a jackknife, a knife with a folding blade, dark brownish-gray, made out of some kind of horn, about five or six inches. If he opens it, it will measure, end to end, 10 or 11 inches. It’s not the knife. Well, it is the knife, but it’s the look on his face that scares me.

“Get off,” I say.

He pushes my bra up over my breasts. I can smell his excitement; it’s like electrified butter, and I zero in on the fact that he must use two hands to open the knife.

“Get off!” I say.

“I am gonna get off,” he whispers.

He lets go of both of my wrists for two seconds to open the knife, and I roll out from under him and run.

I was voted Best Girl Athlete in high school, but I was a high jumper, not a runner. I outrun this boy nonetheless. And on a twisty back road through tangled orange-and-scarlet thickets, a young couple in a car pick me up about a quarter-hour after I escape. The girl says, “I’ll bet a boy tried something with you,” and I say, “Yeah,” and that is the last word I utter about the attack until now.

Had I been an artist, I could have carried the front seat of the car the boy was driving wherever I went on Indiana University’s campus to protest his assault like Emma Sulkowicz carrying her mattress around Columbia University in the greatest art show of 2014, but I didn’t think of it. Perhaps hauling around just the gearshift would have sufficed. But, like many women who are attacked, when I had the most to say, I said the least.

Let’s just double-check my diary: Do I write that I went to the campus police and reported the boy? Do I say I went to the university health clinic and talked with a therapist? No. I say:

BE IT KNOWN—

That from this day forth I will not except [sic] or go on any dates that are not of my choice — they must be boys who are to my liking [I can’t read what I crossed out here]. I have to [sic] many things to do — rather than waste my time with CREEPY BOYS.

(signed) Jeanie Carroll

After college and bumming around Africa, I arrive in Chicago, ready to start my so-called career. I meet one of those semi-good-looking, brown-haired, unimpeachably but forgettably dressed young men who are vice-presidents because their fathers own the company, in this case an employment agency–and–accounting firm–type thing, which, despite the gloss of its golden promise, no longer exists.

He hires me to help “land new accounts.”

“You start tonight,” he says.

“Great!” I say.

“We’re meeting the people from Marshall Field’s. Be at the Pump Room at eight o’clock.”

“Wow!” I say. “The Pump Room!”

Congo-green paisley taffeta dinner suit, whisk-broom eyelashes, Rorschach-inkblot eye shadow, stacked heels, Marquis de Sade hair bow, and skirt up to here, I arrive in the Pump Room. I remember lots of white linen. Sparkling silver. The maître d’ escorts me to a booth, where No. 13 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List rises to greet me and says, “They canceled.”

“Oh dear,” I reply.

“Never mind,” he says. “Sit down.”

He orders drinks, an extra glass of ice, tells me in detail about the new suit he is wearing, and then says, surprised, “Oh damn! My ex-wife just walked in.”

My false eyelashes spring open like parasols.

A smashingly put-together woman with a flamboyant mane of rich red hair is being escorted with an older chap (he is probably all of 35) to a table across the room. When they are seated, my boss raises his glass to her. She nods and raises one eyebrow at him.

“She’s a cunt,” he says.

Ten minutes later, an odd thing happens. My boss’s ex-wife takes her chap’s hand and raises it to her lips. A moment later, my boss takes my hand and raises it to his lips.

I jerk my hand away.

“Just a welcome smooch,” he says. “Don’t be bourgeois.”

He orders another drink. Across the room, my boss’s ex-wife glances at us and puts her two very, very red open lips on her chap’s cheek and — well, there is no verb available — squishes her lips up and down and sorta rolls them around his face like she is the press-and-steam girl at a dry cleaner.

After she concludes, my boss picks up the glass filled with ice, globs in a mouthful, crunches it for a few seconds, and then plants his freezing lips and tongue on my face.

I nearly fly out of the booth.

“GET OFF!” I cry. “Ewwwwwww!”

“You’re soooo booooooozzzzshwaaaaahh,” says my boss.

“Keep it in your mouth, mister!” I say. “Where’s the waiter? I need more bread and butter!”

I am not a foodie. Give me a three-cheese foot-long with a mound of red onions on it or a couple of Amy’s organic black-bean burritos and I’m happy. But wild, half-witted, greener-than-green Jeanie Carroll, 50 years before #MeToo, 40 years before women even begin expecting things could be different Jeanie Carroll, who takes her licks and doesn’t look back, is not about to pass up a dinner in the goddamn Pump Room!

I have the filet mignon. (One of the last times I ever eat meat, so disgusting is this night.)

My boss? He orders another drink and becomes more and more excited, slobbering on my hand like a Doberman playing with his squeaky toy, and meanwhile my boss’s ex-wife — who I now, half a century later, suspect was actually his wife and this was a little game they played to spice things up — starts rubbing her chap’s leg.

My boss and I can’t really see her doing it, as the table linen hangs nearly to the floor, but it is clear from the feverish action of her upper body that she is rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, and when her chap’s eyes close, she goes on rubbing until, with his face still smeared with lipstick and looking like a sophomore standing on the free-throw line in a tied game, the chap stands up, heaves a wad of cash on the table, grabs the wife, and they scamper toward the exit. My boss asks for the check.

My Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight room in the old Hotel Eastgate on Ontario Street no longer exists. But at the time, it is only a dozen or so blocks away, and my boss insists on driving me home. It is my first ride in a Mercedes. I am surprised at how uncomfortable the stiff leather seats are. Two or three blocks from my place, my boss runs a red light, stomps the brakes, skids to a halt, and, jabbering about “that cunt” or “a cunt” or “all cunts,” jams his hand between my legs so hard I bang my head into the dashboard trying to protect myself. I open the car door and bound into the traffic.

My boss must be doing the following things: pulling over, getting out, etc., because as I am about to turn in to the Hotel Eastgate, I look back and see him weaving toward me in a drunken trot. I remember that his legs look menacingly short. I run into the empty hotel lobby. Spurt past the desk. No manager in sight. Check the elevators. Decide to take the stairs two at a time. Hit the second floor. Feeling for the room key in my jacket pocket, I run down the hall, and as I try to put the key in the door, my boss catches me from behind and clamps his teeth on the nape of my neck. I kick backward at his shins, manage to get the key to work, jab a backward elbow into his ribs, squeeze into my room, and push, push, push the door closed.

Have you ever shut a dog outside who wants to come in? My boss scratches and whimpers at that door for the next quarter of an hour. The next day, I get a new job — and never has my lack of all talent been put to better advantage — as a greeter-and-seater at Gino’s East, the Chicago pizza joint beloved by mob guys, journos, and TV glamorosi, and do not so much as call No. 13 to tell him I quit.

Do I attract hideous men? Possibly. But I’ve also encountered many creeps, villains, dickwads,and chumps simply because I’ve been around a long time. I was mostly single, free of encumbrances, and working in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when a woman could scarcely walk down the street without getting hit on or take a job without being underpaid.

So … we may proceed to No. 15 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: Les Moonves, chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of the CBS Corporation.

This happens in the time — one of the happiest of my happy life — when I am booming around the country writing for Esquire. I have been interviewing Moonves in the lounge of the Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills for a story (presciently titled by my editor “Dangerous Minds,” February 1997), and the short, gravel-voiced Moonves apparently takes one look at me — a 50-something journalist in a pair of old brown-and-beige oxfords — and his life is no longer his own.

After the interview is finished (and for a man like Moonves, talking about himself for an hour and a half is as good as downing two gallons of Spanish fly), he follows me to the elevator. When I turn to say good-bye, he says: “You’re smart.”

I say: “Thank you!”

He says: “Smart enough to choose an out-of-the-way hotel,” and he steps into the elevator behind me and, his pants bursting with demands, goes at me like an octopus. I don’t know how many apertures and openings you possess, Reader, but Moonves, with his arms squirming and poking and goosing and scooping and pricking and prodding and jabbing, is looking for fissures I don’t even know I own, and — by God! — I am not certain that even if I pull off one of his arms it won’t crawl after me and attack me in my hotel bed. Hell, I am thrilled I escape before he expels his ink.

Naturally, I do not mention this in the article. I am a member of the Silent Generation. We do not flap our gums. We laugh it off and get on with life. (Moonves, for his part, told New York he “emphatically denies” the incident occurred.)

By now, Silent Generation aside, the question has occurred to you: Why does this woman seem so unfazed by all this horrible crap? Well, I am shallower than most people. I do not dwell on the past. I feel greater empathy for others than for myself. I do not try to control everything. But mainly, I think it is because I have done the thing no Indiana University football team has ever done in history — I have won a national championship: Miss Cheerleader USA. And they fly me to Washington, D.C., to meet President Lyndon Johnson in the Rose Garden. My photo (in a swimsuit!) plays on front pages across the nation. I get a big scholarship and appear on the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth.

This championship is, in fact, so important to the Indiana athletic department that they put me on billboards all over the state of Indiana — giant images of an ecstatic Jeanie escaped from her bottle, soaring above the stunned crowd in the Indiana University football stadium, a big i on my crimson sweater, cheerleading skirt aswirl, legs split like the atom.

And, well, I’ve never really come down … have I?

I’m up there, perpetually, eternally, forever in mid-leap, urging the crowd to never lose hope. I was a cheerleader in grade school. I was a cheerleader in high school. My sisters, Cande and Barbie, were cheerleaders; my brother, Tom, was a pole vaulter, so he jumped too. Today I open a letter for my column, I read the question, and what do I do? I start shouting and yelling and cheering at the correspondent to pick herself up and go on. And, by God! The correspondent does pick herself up and does go on! Because if she doesn’t, I keep yelling at her. And every now and then I shout at myself, “Get the hell up, E. Jean! You half-wit! My God! Get on with it!”

And many women my age just “get on with it” too. It is how we handle things: Chin up! Stop griping! We do not cast ourselves as victims because we do not see ourselves as victims. While the strategy has worked for me, I wish I hadn’t waited so long to say something about two of my Hideous Men.

Beauty contests are such a rage when I am growing up that my camp — a Girl Scout camp! — holds yearly pageants. So it happens that the first beauty contest I am nominated for is Miss Camp Ella J. Logan. (Later I’ll win Miss Indiana University, no doubt due to my “talent”: I take to the stage dressed as Edith Sitwell and perform a dramatic reading of Dick and Jane.)

There is no talent portion at camp, alas. We contestants walk up and down the dock; the judges, who’ve roared across the lake in a magnificent Chris-Craft and who are now seated in deck chairs, call my name.

I walk over and whisper: “What?”

They whisper: “You are Miss Camp Ella J. Logan.”

After they put the papier-mâché crown on my head, the cape on my shoulders, and give me the baton covered in Reynolds Wrap, Old Cam, No. 6 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List, the waterfront director, takes me out in a boat and runs his hands under my shirt and up my shorts. He is breathing and moving his hand slowly and hotly, and I fight no battles in my head. My mind goes white. This is Cam. This is the man who has watched me grow from an 8-year-old Brownie Scout, and his notice is an honor. This is Cam, who teaches me to swim and dive and awards me the coveted White Cap! This is Cam, who continues to run his hand inside my shorts and under my blouse — even in the dining room during dinner, under the table, squeezing my thighs, shoving his fingers — saying, “You’re my girl. You’re my girl. You’re my girl,” and making me Girl Scout–promise “not to tell anyone.”

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing.

He does this until I go home. I am 12.

My friends will be stunned to read this. My sisters and brother will be speechless. But Aly Raisman, the great Olympian gymnast, and the more than 150 young women who spoke out in court about Lawrence Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor, will not be shocked. Nassar abused some of the young women in front of their own mothers. Nobody saw it.

And old Cam? He writes a book called The Girl Scout Man. It is listed in “rather remarkable” condition, though there is some “light foxing and some very modest yellowing of the pages,” on Abe Books, the rare-books dealer. Here is a shortened version of its description:

“This loving homage to Girl Scouting is a record of many of the experiences and incidents and occurrences spanning the over twenty-five years of dedicated service of Cam Parks, done mostly at Camp Ella J. Logan, near Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the shore of Dewart Lake. If you, Reader, are an alumnus of Logan … memories of time spent at this camp may well be sweeping over you right now.”

No thank you.

As a Scout, I returned to Camp Ella J. Logan year after year, becoming tall and womanly, receiving letters from boys with swak written on the backs of the envelopes, going on weeklong canoe trips, and completing my counselor-in-training program.

Cam I avoided. Never once did I speak to him or look at him again, but my brain does not avoid him. He and his maroon swim trunks may have been dead these last 40 years, but old Cam and the boat are the events — of all the events in my life — that somehow swim constantly back into my head. And it’s Cam who, when he dies at the age of 72 and the story starts going around that he was “suddenly dismissed” from coaching, causes me the most pain.

I could have spoken up! Maybe not when I was 12. But when I was 25. He died when I was 34. I might have stopped him.

Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said:  “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.

His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.

This is during the years I am doing a daily Ask E. Jean TV show for the cable station America’s Talking, a precursor to MSNBC launched by Roger Ailes (who, by the way, is No. 16 on my list).

Early one evening, as I am about to go out Bergdorf’s revolving door on 58th Street, and one of New York’s most famous men comes in the revolving door, or it could have been a regular door at that time, I can’t recall, and he says: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!”

And I say to No. 20 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: “Hey, you’re that real-estate tycoon!”

I am surprised at how good-looking he is. We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light but he looks prettier than ever. This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 because he’s garbed in a faultless topcoat and I’m wearing my black wool Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.

“Come advise me,” says the man. “I gotta buy a present.”

“Oh!” I say, charmed. “For whom?”

“A girl,” he says.

“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?” I say.

“Not this one,” he says. Or perhaps he says, “Not this time.” I can’t recall. He is a big talker, and from the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.

As we are standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags. “How about—”

“No!” he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips like he’s balancing a spoon under his nose, and begins talking about how he once thought about buying Bergdorf ’s.

“Or … a hat!” I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags, which, at the period I’m telling you about — and Bergdorf’s has been redone two or three times since then — are mixed in with, and displayed next to, the hats. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”

I don’t remember what he says, but he comes striding along — greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint and permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him — and goes right for a fur number.

“Please,” I say. “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”

What he replies I don’t recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it’s a baby otter.

“How old is the lady in question?” I ask.

“How old are you?” replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon-dating a thighbone he’s found in Olduvai Gorge.

“I’m 52,” I tell him.

“You’re so old!” he says, laughing — he was around 50 himself — and it’s at about this point that he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, “Lingerie!” Or he may have said “Underwear!” So we stroll to the escalator. I don’t remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.

I have no recollection where lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf’s, but it seems to me it is on a floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and I arrive — and my memory now is vivid — no one is present.

There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”

“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”

“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.

“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.

“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”

“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.

“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”

This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!

There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:

Did I report it to the police?

No.

Did I tell anyone about it?

Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.

“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”

My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)

Do I have photos or any visual evidence?

Bergdorf’s security cameras must have picked us up at the 58th Street entrance of the store. We would have been filmed on the ground floor in the bags-and-hats sections. Cameras also must have captured us going up the escalator and into the lingerie department. New York law at the time did not explicitly prohibit security cameras in dressing rooms to “prevent theft.” But even if it had been captured on tape, depending on the position of the camera, it would be very difficult to see the man unzipping his pants, because he was wearing a topcoat. The struggle might simply have read as “sexy.” The speculation is moot, anyway: The department store has confirmed that it no longer has tapes from that time.

Why were there no sales attendants in the lingerie department?

Bergdorf Goodman’s perfections are so well known — it is a store so noble, so clubby, so posh — that it is almost easier to accept the fact that I was attacked than the fact that, for a very brief period, there was no sales attendant in the lingerie department. Inconceivable is the word. Sometimes a person won’t find a sales attendant in Saks, it’s true; sometimes one has to look for a sales associate in Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, or even Tiffany’s; but 99 percent of the time, you will have an attendant in Bergdorf’s. All I can say is I did not, in this fleeting episode, see an attendant. And the other odd thing is that a dressing-room door was open. In Bergdorf’s dressing rooms, doors are usually locked until a client wants to try something on.

Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?

Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward.

 So now I will tell you what happened:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.

And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.

From What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, by E. Jean Carroll. Copyright © 2019 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. James, Arthur, and Evelyn are pseudonyms.

Hideous Men :  Donald Trump assaulted me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago. But he’s not alone on the list of awful men in my life. By E. Jean Carroll.  The Cut, June 21, 2019.

                                                                   E. Jean Carroll

In the southeastern corner of Missouri is a tiny town that was named by a man, local lore has it, in honor of his girlfriend. She was Shawnee; when it was time to make his tribute to her official, the man, Samuel Green, came to the realization that he was unable to fully pronounce—or accurately spell—his beloved’s name. So he paid her what he determined to be the next-best form of appreciation: He named the town after the only Native American woman whose name he was able to spell. Pocahontas, Missouri, was born.

The writer E. Jean Carroll hears this bit of myth while visiting Pocahontas over the course of the extended road trip she takes for her new book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. At a local pie shop, she asks the owners about the provenance of their town’s name. Getting her answer, Carroll finds herself considering the fate of the woman: “I like to imagine the Shawnee girlfriend,” she writes, “mounting her stallion, galloping out of Missouri, riding across America, founding her own town, and, because she can’t keep white guys straight, calling it DermotMulroneyDylanMcDermottDeanMcDermott.”

What Do We Need Men For?, which publishes this week, began as a conceit in search of an insight. Carroll, the initial plan went, would travel to American towns named after women—places such as Charlotte, Vermont; Tallulah, Louisiana; Marianna, Arkansas; Angelica, New York; and Pocahontas, Missouri. She would visit more than two dozen locations that celebrate, at least as far as the map goes, the lives of women—and then ask those towns’ residents a central, Jonathan Swift–ian, satirical-serious question: What do we need men for? It was a hero’s-journey setup, promising the kind of extended jape Carroll has specialized in, as a journalist and as a gimlet-eyed advice columnist for Elle magazine: roving, curious, compassionate, whimsical. Its emphasis on geography would add a cheeky new dimension to that foundationally feminist argument: that women navigate a world designed by, and for, men. “The whole female sex,” Carroll writes at the beginning of the book that resulted, “seems to agree that men are becoming a nuisance with their lying, cheating, robbing, perjuring, assaulting, murdering, voting debauchers onto the Supreme Court, threatening one another with intercontinental ballistic nuclear warheads, and so on.”

As Carroll embarked on the trip, however, her premise expanded. The journey began in October 2017, just after the alleged predations of Harvey Weinstein were revealed and not long after a man who bragged about assaulting women was elevated to the American presidency. As the roads unfurled before her, memories returned. Realities became unavoidable. In Anita, Indiana, Carroll met a woman with red hair, a shade shared by the friend who happened, decades before, to glimpse welts on Carroll’s neck and put the pieces together. Neurons zipped. Trauma erupts unpredictably. Travel has a way of making things plain.

If you’ve read the excerpt from Carroll’s book that New York magazine published late last month, then you have a sense of the shape What Do We Need Men For? ultimately took, as satire’s center proved unable, fully, to hold. The memoir is currently getting the attention it is (such as it is) in part because its author is a beloved and famous writer, but in part as well because of one of the many claims Carroll makes in it: that, in the mid-1990s, Donald Trump cornered her in a department-store dressing room and raped her. (The president has dismissed Carroll’s story, just as he has dismissed the claims of the 21 other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.) New York magazine’s lengthy excerpt of the book goes out of its way to contextualize the news-making allegation: “Donald Trump assaulted me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago,” its headline reads. “But he’s not alone on the list of awful men in my life.”

It is that rarest of things—a headline that undersells. Donald Trump, in this setting, is most assuredly not alone. The story that started with a road trip structures itself instead around the collection Carroll describes as her Most Hideous Men of My Life List—21 of them, alternately neglectful and mendacious and careless and violent and cruel. It takes her 273 pages to describe them all. The list includes Les Moonves, who, Carroll claims, attacked her in an elevator after she interviewed him for a report about the psychology of TV executives. (Moonves, too, denies Carroll’s allegation.) It includes the romantic partner who, Carroll alleges, in a fit of rage, nearly choked her to death. (The New York Times, reporting on Carroll’s allegations, contacted the man she identifies in the book only by his initials; he declined to comment.) It includes a college classmate who, one crisp fall weekend, drove Carroll to an isolated area to look at the color-changing leaves, threw her on the ground, pulled a knife, and tried to rape her (she fought him off and then outran him, she writes). It includes the boyfriend of a babysitter who, with the sitter, made a game out of disrobing and then fondling the very young Carroll. It includes a camp counselor who molested her when she was 12.

There’s much more, as Carroll drives and remembers; the thing about a list is that it will keep on going until the list itself decides it is finished. There’s the television publicist who attacked Carroll in her car, she writes, “the same week Moonves attacked me in the Nikko Hotel elevator.” There’s the mob boss in Chicago. There’s Carroll’s own boss in the same city. There’s the official who refused to issue her a passport “unless I had dinner with him and sat on his lap.” There’s the rapist and serial killer—yes—who approached Carroll when she was on the porch of her house outside Nyack, New York, and who, when her dog growled at him, backed away. The man, Carroll writes, would go on to rape and nearly kill her neighbor later the same day.

There is still more. And not all the hideousness is sexual in nature. There’s—and at this point, Auntie E. might warn her readers that there is one more round of listing to go, and advise them to take a cleansing breath—the fur trapper in Montana (“a torturer of animals”), and the financial adviser (Dweebie D. Fleecer, she dubs him) who lost much of the money Carroll had given him as a seed for a retirement fund and then, when she questioned the failure, blamed her for his bad investments. There’s the mechanic Carroll meets on her road trip, after her car breaks down in Blytheville, Arkansas; he charges her an exorbitant fee to make the repairs, shortly after which the car breaks down again, leaving her driving without functioning brakes. (Carroll is able to maneuver the car into a stop at an empty parking lot; a man materializes to inform her, angrily, “You can’t park here.” Carroll explains the situation: busted brakes, just need to park long enough to get a tow, the whole thing. The fellow who quickly makes it to No. 9 on Carroll’s Hideous Men list repeats his no-parking mandate and punctuates it, she writes, with a warning: “Get out now.” She has little choice but to restart her brakeless car and comply.)

There are, then, two versions of Carroll’s book. There is, on the one hand, What Do We Need Men For? as a news maker—as a memoir that contains a serious allegation of sexual violence against the sitting president of the United States. But there is also What Do We Need Men For? as a consideration of the we of the book’s title: a story of gendered predation, as it has stretched across Carroll’s own life and across the lives of many of the women she speaks with as she travels. This latter version is strikingly cheery in its tone. Carroll refers to herself as “an eccentric personality,” and this is evident even in her story about abuse. The car she travels in is a Toyota Prius that she bought used and then hand-painted with large polka dots and frogs. (She named the vehicle Miss Bingley, after Jane Austen’s side-eyeing mean girl.) Her companion for the trip is her dog, a poodle rescue named Lewis Carroll. (Her cat, Vagina T. Fireball, she left in the care of a neighbor in New York.) You get the sense, as the story goes along, that Carroll’s quirkiness itself has a double valence: It is evidence of her simply being true to herself, but it is also an act of resistance—a declaration, to those who would try to diminish her, that she will respond with insistent humanity.

Carroll, in interviews, has emphasized the whimsy of the book—the memoir is “a merry romp,” she told CNN’s Brian Stelter—and there is indeed a certain mirth to the proceedings. But the strategic collisions of tragedy and comedy also become, as the story goes on, reliably gutting. “I am sick to my stomach,” Carroll writes on page 184, in an extended footnote about Moonves and his assorted enablers. By that point, dear reader, you are very likely feeling the same.

Carroll’s “merry romp” is overwhelming. It is exhausting. That is the point. This is not only a book about the failures of individual men; it is also a book, as its Swiftian title suggests, about the failures of a system that has given men the power to determine the whos and wheres and hows of women’s lives. Carroll does not talk much about patriarchy or toxic masculinity or trauma or otherwise make much use of the current feminist vernacular; the book can read, at points, as preemptively dated, with its references to “the whole female sex” and similarly winking generalizations. What it offers, though, is a kind of literary impressionism, based on 75 years of lived experience—a sense of what it feels like to have pulsing veins and fiery nerves and a teeming mind and be caught within the cold infrastructures of sexism.

The list Carroll creates, in that way, isn’t merely a list, or a method of organizing a narrative; it is also an indictment. It is a testament to the dull banalities of sexual violence. It is a reminder of the varied forms, insidious as well as obvious, such violence can take. The book stayed true, in that sense, to Carroll’s initial premise for it: It is a memoir that is rooted in maps. It suggests all that can happen, at the most local of levels, in a land that names towns after women and tells the rest of them to know their place.

You Should Really Read E. Jean Carroll’s Memoir :  What Do We Need Men For? is overwhelming. It is exhausting. That is the point. By Megan Garber. The Atlantic, July 3, 2019.