by Edward Champion

The Disease of Male Self-Pity

The current sweep of male self-pity essays fails to address the considerable hurt suffered by women. I bring my own experience into play, arguing that male self-pity is a terrible disease that requires a lifetime of learning and humility.

In the last week, two magazines have opened their tony doors to two former radio show hosts who abused their power and harmed women. The first piece was published in Harper’s. It was written by John Hockenberry, the former host of The Takeaway who was fired after facing numerous sexual harassment allegations. Hockenberry had clearly learned nothing from his experience. He painted his behavior as “something once called romance” and even had the temerity to quote from Lord Byron.

Days later, The New York Review of Books published “Reflections from a Hashtag,” a 3,500 word essay from former Canadian radio icon Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi, whose career ended after he faced sexual assault allegations from more than twenty women, was similarly without contrition or rigorous self-examination. He failed to mention the apology he was ordered to give to Kathryn Borel. And there was ancillary cluelessness from the top brass people who had commissioned the essay. In an astonishing interview with Slate‘s Isaac Chotiner, NYRB editor Ian Buruma cheapened Ghomeshi’s baneful manipulation of women by referring to sexual behavior as a “many-faceted business.” What Buruma and Harper’s head John R. MacArthur failed to see, both in authorizing and publishing these essays, was not only the extremely necessary climate shift ushered in by the #metoo movement, a reversal of patriarchal abuse that has been too long in arriving, but the manner in which these abusers retreated to self-pity and defensiveness. Both Hockenberry and Ghomeshi expressed zero concern for the women they abused. And if one is to reckon with the truth, then it means owning up to the totality of how one has harmed.

I have some first-hand experience with what Hockenberry and Ghomeshi are going through. In 2014, I was someone who operated in the literary world and I suffered a mental collapse. I wrote a terrible essay streaked with misogyny that I did not recognize, threatened to reveal an embarrassing personal detail about a woman on Twitter, and attempted suicide. I deservedly lost everything I had. Because what I did was disgraceful and barbaric and unacceptable. It has taken me years to come to terms with this, years of changing patterns of behavior (not always successfully) that I now understand to be very wrong, so wrong that any pain or hurt that I have experienced, however crippling, is completely insignificant and does not justify your compassion or consideration. As a man, I meted out harm to women through words, not fully understanding what I was doing. I wish that someone would have pulled me aside and told me that what I saw as satire was actually being perceived as abuse and that this was a viable interpretation. I was smart enough to read and understand Ulysses and To the Lighthouse. So why was I so gormless in failing to recognize this? To not understand that people (including women) were terrified by me and that my behavior fit into a terrible historical pattern of male privilege that we very much need to correct? My occasional harsh words not only blotted out everything good that I had ever done, but it was a complete betrayal to the many women who I genuinely held up with great respect.

I should have used whatever limited talent I possessed to establish trust rather than fear. But people in the literary world became very afraid of me. Many still are. And I had no real ability to understand this. Stupidly, I could not comprehend that the votes of confidence that many editors gave me did not just involve my writing chops, but their faith in me as a professional and as a person. And while I delivered lexical pyrotechnics and never once blew a deadline, I failed to live up to my responsibilities as a man. I became a shitty media man. I hurt people, often unknowingly, including people who were very close to me and who will now never talk with me. I did not understand how fierce my words came across, even though what poured from my fingers on a red hot night felt far too often like the illusory comfort of a concealed gun tucked neatly beneath a duster.

I’ve come to understand that I do not deserve forgiveness. That is the democratic consensus and, if I believe in egalitarianism and humanity, then I have to carry on accepting this. I can either flail against the plurality like a stubborn outlier who learns nothing or accept the wisdom of crowds and become the best man that I can, even though I know that this will probably never be enough. And that’s just as it should be. Because my suffering is nothing compared to the people who were terrified of me or who, in a few cases, were reduced to hurtful tears because of pieces I wrote or alcohol-fueled tweets I fired off or phone calls I made to seek what I perceived at the time as justice but what I now understand to be that most commonplace trait of abusers: ego incarnate.

And I don’t need three thousand words to say all this. Because all this is very simple to understand, although it takes a very long time to shave off your repugnant stubble with Occam’s razor. But that’s what male self-pity does. It cajoles your identity into complacence and keeps you believing that everything you do is right or that all transgressions can be justified. And you get so caught up in this endless excavation of the self, which is often one of the few ways you can survive because so many have ostracized you, that there is little room for considering the more important viewpoints of those who you harmed.

It lacerates me to the core to be lassoed in with sexual predators whenever a big magazine publishes one of these male self-pity pieces, but the finer details of how I deal with this anguish are not something I should share. To do so would be to give into hubris (seen in Ghomeshi’s egregious humble brag “But I was the guy everyone hated first”) and self-pity. For this reason I have placed myself with Hockenberry and Ghomeshi in the photo accompanying this article. If the people have decided that I am a monster, then I am a monster. Doesn’t matter if it’s the past, the present, or the future. Time is immaterial. What’s more important than any personal struggle I experience is to understand how I have hurt people and to continue to do everything in my power not to do so again. You don’t get to come out of the woodwork after four years and pretend as if nothing had happened with what The Cut‘s Ruth Spencer has smartly identified as a “charm offensive.” This is something that takes a lifetime.

10/12 ADDENDUM OFFERED IN RESPONSE TO STEPHEN ELLIOTT’S LAWSUIT AGAINST MOIRA DONEGAN:

You try and move forward with your life: listening to women, including women, reading women, learning from women, writing mostly women characters (far from stereotypical), hearing from women who listen to your show, donating to women, volunteering for women, doing all sorts of things for women that you never tell anyone, making sure that the women you run into always know they are respected and valued and that they are awesome, singling out women before men in social functions to atone for centuries of sexism and patriarchy. And you still feel that this is not enough. But you must do all this when your name is included on a list. Because you must always learn. The rumors themselves don’t matter. You know what happened. But the truth you know isn’t as important as the truth of what others intuit about you. You know what you have to work on and what you’re still working on. But the more important thing for you to understand is how your name came to be associated with this vile masculine strain and put on a list. Because you want to rid yourself of the taint and learn. And time passes and people see what you’re doing. And it seems like everything’s okay and it is. Because you’re learning and listening and understanding more than you ever have before. And this is good and positive. Your eyes are opening and you’re becoming a better man and people remark upon this. Not that you’re looking to score points. You’re just trying to be a better man. And that takes a lifetime. And then some repugnant talentless writer, a cruel selfish man who thinks of no one but himself and who has learned nada, who once threatened you with violence and harassed a friend of yours and threw a beer into the face of a decent man, and who is out for nothing more than petty revenge, does the unthinkable: he threatens and terrorizes women who had the guts to speak up so that an important perspective could be offered to the world and bad things could stop. He threatens these women with a lawsuit. And your name is somehow the second one on the GoFundMe legal defense list, which is the real list you want to be on so that the world can know that you’re learning even though your presence on that list doesn’t matter and even though this freshly dredged up anguish and your fury towards the man for halting the vital learning that you and far too many others need must remain insignificant because the women rightly matter more than you do and this is their moment and it must always be until we fix this, if we ever can. Because the situation doesn’t look good when guys like Kavanaugh get a free pass. And you feel as if this monstrous act by a truly shitty media man sets you back in your learning and sets women back in their necessary moment of justice. And you wonder how you and the world can ever learn because there are truly shitty men out there who don’t get what you are starting to know even if there’s a good chance you’ll never know enough and you’ll always be shitty even as you learn. But being shitty, you must avoid self-pity. No accident that it rhymes. This isn’t about you but it is about you, but you take your lumps and you remind yourself that the women always come first and that this fresh attention-seeking demon must be fought with all resources. And then you go grab a beer or three and you carry on with your learning, hoping that one day it will be enough, even though it may never be. And this, I think, is the last I have to say on the matter. Besides, it’s the women we need to hear from, not me. But I needed to write this. Because I am angry on their behalf.

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to make a contribution to Moira Donegan’s legal defense fund.

by Edward Champion

The Casual Villainy of Feel-Good Neoliberal Bullshit

I attended a private film screening and was confronted by cruel and dangerous myths from Panglossian neoliberals. They need to be stopped.

A few nights ago, a very kind friend took me to a private screening of a film about homelessness, under the presumed theory that my own homeless experience from four years before might be of help to the filmmaker. This filmmaker, who I should point out was an extremely tall and quietly affable man (affable, at least, to anyone who he detected was very much like himself!), believed, like many myopic neoliberals, that he was doing the right thing with his film. But he wasn’t. He was, in fact, contributing dangerously and cruelly to a repulsive dehumanizing myth that has become as seductive as catnip to most of the American population.

The film played. The affluent crowd that gathered in the basement of this tony Manhattan restaurant cheered as some talking head boasted about delivering forty pairs of socks to the homeless. The socks, said this starry-eyed subject, were a way to give the homeless an identity. But I knew damn well that what these people really needed, as I once so desperately begged for, was food, a shelter that wasn’t committed to daily debasement and that actually did something to protect residents from random stabbings, and a stable job that permitted someone who had nothing to save enough resources for first and last month’s rent. This preposterous subject also bragged on film about taking homeless people to a comedy show to cheer them up. Never mind that this is a risible impossibility, considering that shelters impose a draconian curfew each night, usually sometime between 9 PM and 10 PM, that you must hit. If you don’t make this curfew, for which you must factor in a lengthy line in which security guards pat you down and tear through what little you have, you will lose your bed and have all your possessions, meager as they are, thrown into a huge plastic bag and tossed into the street. (This happened to me. And I was forced to haul a very heavy bag with fragile lining, half of what I had damaged and dingy, on a subway, where I could feel the eyes of every commuter looking the other direction.)

I watched as a shoeshine man on-screen bought into the lazy, drug-addled homeless stereotype who never seeks out work (oh, but they do, even when they have a substance abuse problem!). It was a trope no different from the way Reagan had used Linda Taylor, an incredibly rare and unlikely figure hardly representative of homelessness, to establish his staunch conservatism and needlessly demonize the welfare system in 1976. And I was shaking with indignation as the filmmaker, who appeared himself as the film’s first talking head in a bona-fide act of artistic narcissism, bragged about how he had talked to a homeless person, believing her sad face to be an act. He refused to acknowledge her real pain and true fear as he painted himself as a champion of the underprivileged. I looked to my right and I witnessed the filmmaker himself sitting in his chair, responding to his repugnant untruths and counterfactual bromides by bobbing his head up and down to every cinematic cadence he had manufactured.

The film I saw, or at least what I mostly saw (because I bolted after about thirty minutes of this: I was so enraged after one “well-meaning” audience member laughed at a homeless stereotype and chuckled over the film’s bootstraps bullshit, which presented poverty as a “choice,” an emphasis that greatly overshadowed, oh say, examining the details of a rigged system or humanizing the people who are often locked into a nigh inescapable abyss and who are rendered invisible simply because they lost their jobs at a bad time or suffered any number of setbacks that could happen to anyone (hell, it happened to me!), and because this was a “celebration” for the filmmaker and I knew that if I stuck around, I would have gone out of my way to fight fiercely with ruthlessly truthful invective and I am really trying to live a more peaceful life and let things go more — but goddammit you see puffed up privilege like this and it’s not easy!), angered me beyond belief. It was a superficial glimpse of what at least half a million people in this nation go through (and this number is rising): an absolute lie that refused to address vile welfare-to-work realities, the shameful bureaucracy of standing in line for a day arguing to some underpaid heartless stooge why you should get a mere $150 each month to eat (and under Trump, these already svelte and insufficient benefits are in danger of being cut further), the violent and depressing culture within homeless shelters that causes so many to give up and that causes smart people (and let me assure you that there are many smart people who are homeless) to throw in the towel when they shouldn’t have to.

As many have argued (including Thomas Frank, whom I interviewed about this significant problem here), the Democratic Party has completely divorced itself from advocating for working people and those who need our help. The Democrats haven’t seriously championed for universal aid since Mario Cuomo’s inspiring keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. When principled progressives stand against this milquetoast centrism, they are — as this incredible episode of This American Life recently revealed — urged to push the reasons why they are running into the middle if they want access to funds that will help them win elections. And when candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually stand for something and beat out long-time incumbents in a primary, they are, as the disheartening replies to this tweet reveal, declared “a piece of work” and “arrogant” by middle-of-the-road cowards who have never known a day without a hot meal and who refuse to address deeply pernicious realities that people actually live. These weak-kneed and priggish pilgarlics still drop dollars with their colicky hands into the room rental till for their Why Isn’t Hillary President? support groups. They are more interested in wrapping themselves in warm comforting blankets rather than surrendering their bedding to someone sleeping on the streets. They are so enamored and ensnared by this ugly and unsound marriage between capitalism and humanism that they adamantly refuse to listen to the very people they’ve pledged to cure. They ignore any fresh new voice who has the steel to launch a political campaign based on the truth. Their shaky tenure is out of sync with the robust reform we need right now to address our national ills.

I now believe neoliberalism to be just as much of an evil cancer as Trumpism. It needs to be fought hard. Because any ideology that prioritizes supremacy (and neoliberals can be a smug and oh so certain bunch) is a call to dehumanize others.

So how did the film screening conclude? Well, I apologized to my friend, told her that I couldn’t take the film anymore and that I knew this was triggering deep rage in me because it denied and invalidated the horrors that I personally experienced and that I had somehow found the resilience and strength to overcome. I took my leave, tipped the bartender far more than these moneyed types did, and saw that the filmmaker was watching me. What? A man fleeing his unquestionable genius? Why yes, you imperious insensitive clueless dope! So I went up to him and said, “My name is Ed Champion. I was homeless four years ago and your film is a terrible lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.” True to form, he went back to cheering on his own film, paying me no heed whatsoever.

by Edward Champion

How Do You Spend Your Summer Day?

The summer has arrived. It’s beautiful! But a chance encounter with an archenemy has me pondering vital questions about happiness.

It was ninety degrees in New York and everyone was happy. Vivacious kids shouted at a cheery vendor for cherry ice and the hearty proprietor waved his hand, ushering the kids beneath his canopied shade as he carved out bright granular chunks into pristine cups. A shirtless man with a ratty straw hat angled at a hard random slope strummed a banjo in the park and attracted admirers. Not long before, I ambled past the crackling reports of men slamming dominoes onto the artisanal concrete of fixed outdoor tables sprouting from a brick sidewalk. Even the squirrels were decent enough to leave people alone. It was the kind of summer day where the humidity stops just short of uncomfortable and the sweat feels more like a comforting film and the heat peals a pleasant melody into your pores. And there’s really nothing to complain about at all.

I was walking around Lower Manhattan with a big smile on my face. I had just bought David Lynch’s new book and had read the first few pages and was caught in a very giddy daydream, thinking about some funny characters on a story I’m now working on. That’s when I spotted one of my archenemies, one of the old ones from the literary days. She had once publicly announced that she would throw a fulsome fete if I successfully managed to kill myself (and she had never apologized for it). That couldn’t be her, could it?

The sun was pleasant and the laughs were infectious and my ears picked up the hilarious snippet of a woman describing her hookup from the night before on the phone. And the warm rays kept me giddy. No matter. Not important. Let my archenemy stray away. Now about this barbeque scene! Oh, my actor will love that twist! And if I make that narrative move, oh man, this is going to be so much fun to produce and edit!

And I carried on walking and I looked around and I listened and I marveled and I felt truly blissful. My smile did not wane. How could it? I was still in an incredibly marvelous mood. I’d had a very fun weekend, probably the most fun I’d had all summer, probably among one of the best summer weekends of the last five years if I had to be honest, even if I had not slept much. Wonderful people, everyone friendly, banter with good friends, strange and unreportable adventures. The sight of my archenemy dissipated from my mind completely.

That’s when I looked up and saw my archenemy go way out of her way to cross twenty feet through a thick throng of people, approaching me like a stalker who flouts a restraining order. She was gunning at me with an especially forced and artificial smile. It was the shit-eating grin of someone who wanted to announce that she was a conquerer, but who lacked finesse. I didn’t find her threatening or intimidating in the least. But I did see a sad look in her eyes that her fury could not entirely occlude, the lonely look you often spot in a bully’s adamantine gaze. I still didn’t know if it was really her. And I honestly didn’t care. I mean, I was just happy, truly happy. The hell of it was that she could have spouted off the nastiest invective in the world and I would have (a) probably been very congenial and (b) easily welcomed an opportunity to patch things up.

Finally the moment arrived. What did she say? She said, “Excuse me.” A soft voice. No plan. She didn’t say her name. She didn’t say mine. She didn’t acknowledge what she had done. Or even the many other times she dehumanized me. She didn’t even have the decency to cry “J’accuse!” and declare me the villain. What she probably saw was a very abstracted man lost in his own felicitous reveries, which seemed a damned strange target to impugn and which defied her easy thesis about me. I walked to the right. She then heaved her way there. And we faced each other and I said “Oop!” in the way that Nicholson Baker memorialized in The Mezzanine and we somehow walked past each other. And then I realized that it had been her.

Why had she done this? Well, that question is unimportant. That question is not the right one to dwell on.

What I felt at that moment was not anger, but compassion and pity. One of us was committed to natural connection, to embracing life’s funny knack for resembling a dreamstate. The other saw an enemy she had never had the guts to talk to and zeroed in and went well out of her way to act on a tepid hate. Something about seeing her do this made me realize that only one of us had grown and the other had stagnated. One of us was committed to wonder and positivism. The other was looking for a fight. And when people look for a fight, they are often doing this because they haven’t found the guts to confront their own fears and to stare down hard truths and to finally love the totality of who they are so that they can, in turn, love the totality contained in others.

And that’s the thing about happiness. It is a close cousin to maturity in the way that it sneaks up on you without warning. Months pass and you commit yourself to fully embracing who you are and you suddenly find that you can take more hits on the chin or even forgive someone who had been nothing but nasty and hateful and vituperative to you. And you wonder just who in the hell this new person is. Yet this is a self-examination that’s really not worth going into. The takeaway here isn’t that you’re better when you’re happy, although there is that. It’s that you’re kinder and stronger, kinder and stronger in ways that the unhappy bully never can be. And happiness really is the thing to chase. I really believe that this is the quality that will eventually restore America from its often harrowing fascist trajectory. It may take many years, but we will do it.

As I sauntered into the end of a glorious July afternoon, I knew now that only one of us considered the other an archenemy. I also knew that one of us would enjoy the summer and the other would not. Sometimes it’s just a question of how you decide to spend your summer day.

by Edward Champion

The Rightful End of Roseanne

The end of Roseanne proved that, for now at least, there are limits to American xenophobia expressed through mass entertainment. But the troubling question is whether this is the beginning or the end of network-sanctioned white supremacy.

Roseanne Barr is finished. And it’s about goddam time.

I watched the first few episodes of the Roseanne reboot with an open mind, but the show’s racism and intolerance, well on display within the show and bluntly expressed in Roseanne’s off-air demeanor, demonstrated very conclusively that this was not a contemporary answer to All in the Family, but something more akin to a sitcom version of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. An early scene showing the Conners swapping an insufficient supply of medication due to inadequate American healthcare created the illusion that this was a show like its previous iteration, one aligned with the working class roots that had made the original such a success. But then we saw the Conners casually belittling “all the shows about black and Asian families” and it became very clear that this was a program committed to white supremacy. As The New Yorker‘s Emily Nussbaum pointed out, the show relied on coded language, unrealistic dialogue, and sideways jabs to disguise its bigotry-drenched narrative.

I was not the only viewer to flee. It took only weeks for the reboot to drop from 18.44 million viewers to a mere 10.42 million. This was the show that Trump had said “was about us,” but that “us” shed 44% of its purported unity within months. The cast and crew quickly became unsettled by the Faustian bargain they had bought into. Co-showrunner Whitney Cummings left. Then writer Wanda Sykes left. And as actress Emma Kenney was about to bolt, she was informed by her manager that the show was cancelled. The linchpin was a startlingly racist tweet in which Roseanne declared that former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett was the product of “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes [sic]” having a baby.

For anybody who had been watching this hatred from the sidelines, Roseanne’s vulgar and vituperative racism was there in the unfettered manner in which she tweeted easily debunked alt-right conspiracy theories as if these hurtful falsehoods represented true gospel. She falsely claimed in March that David Hogg, one of the brave kids who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and who went on to become a formidable activist, had offered a Nazi salute, despite the fact that Roseanne herself had dressed up as Hitler for Heeb Magazine.

Barring a pickup from an online streaming giant — an unlikely event, given Amazon’s recent woes with Transparent and the Roy Price scandal, Netflix cutting ties with Louis CK, and Hulu likely not wanting to risk its progressive-minded programming slate given the success of The Handmaid’s Tale — there is little chance that Roseanne will return, unless she decides to produce it on her own dime. And even then, she would probably not have enough clout to convince all the cast members and crew to return. Such a hypothetical reboot, untethered from the manacles of network Standards and Practices, would only amp up the atavism further in the interest of “truth-telling,” perhaps inspiring the Southern Poverty Law Center to include Roseanne Barr amidst its distressingly voluminous list of offenders.

This was the first television show cancelled by a single tweet. And I don’t think it will be the last. What Roseanne’s self-immolation demonstrates, quite rightfully and righteously I think, is that America does have limits to what it will tolerate. There will undoubtedly be Daily Caller-reading banshees writing thinkpieces proclaiming this cancellation as a calumny upon the First Amendment. But the decision to write and produce a show, much less watch one, has not been quelled and the audience hungry for this casual xenophobia has regrettably not been deracinated. There are still ten million loyal Roseanne viewers. And I can easily imagine Roseanne being propped up as an underground comic, recast as an alt-right faux Lenny Bruce or perhaps the American answer to Dieudonné, and making a fortune through a monthly Patreon account.

In an age in which a self-help transphobic huckster like Jordan Peterson is framed by the “Paper of Record” as a “dark web intellectual,” Roseanne will probably not be the last repugnant show airing on American television. I fear that we are only at the beginning of hatred and intolerance marketed as “wholesome entertainment.” And while mainstream media rejects Roseanne, one must now be on the lookout for independently produced offerings cut from the same Klan cloth that are snatched up by television executives in the interest of corporate profit. This is, after all, how Roseanne was rebooted in the first place. The question now is who has the chutzpah to push the envelope further into a fetid swamp of ugliness and whether some network desperate for a hit is willing to pick up such a bilious offering, counting upon the American public to forget how these same gatekeepers helped make Roseanne happen in the first place.

by Edward Champion

We’ve Updated Our Privacy Policy

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Edward Champion is committed to bringing you the most truthful and bracing accounts of our modern world, whether the stories are fiction or nonfiction. And we want to make sure that you’re aware of some updates to our Privacy Policy so that we may better comply with one of the European Union’s newfangled progressive acronyms. It will help you better understand how and why we collect and use certain information pertaining to your life experience.

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