Inkhaven Day 23 - One of the Good Guys

In the Spirit, Not the Letter: Part 4 of 4

“Like any part of a human mind that gets crushed or dominated or cut off or dismissed, it doesn’t go away. It just stays there, and it pops up in a million weird ways that aren’t conscious. Like, why is that guy acting so weird at that party around women? It’s some desire he can’t see, something that got lost, something living in his shadow. He cut it off or lost it but it’s still in him, it’s still acting on the world whether he knows where it comes from or not.”

—Rose Curzi [a co-resident, epigraphed here with permission]

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

—Alan Watts [relevantly: a brilliant and deeply flawed individual]

A couple days after that conversation in the Winner’s Lounge, three of my favorite people came to visit me at the residency: my partner Alex, and my friends Theo and Rena. At some point, we were joined by Graham, a guy in my cohort I liked but didn’t know well.

The five of us had a great conversation, which included giving shape to a lot of the dynamics that later became Part 1 of this series: catch vs. dodgeball, the weaponization of social dynamics, signal-seeking pings vs. entrapment.

Graham said, “The thing is not to make the path of least resistance the one where she doesn’t say “no,” where the onus is on her to recover her bodily autonomy and keep defending it. Where getting somewhere with someone might wind up having more to do with whether they’re scared, or tired, or intoxicated, or embarrassed, or surprised...”

Not long later, other residents trickled in, and we’d splintered off into smaller-group conversations. At one point I looked over and noticed Graham’s arm around Rena. They seemed to be having a one-on-one conversation. I hadn’t sensed a vibe between them, but given what I’d just heard him say minutes before, I assumed there must have been some prior mutual flirtation that I simply hadn’t noticed. I was distracted and fairly intoxicated, so I didn’t think much of it.

The night went on. My gut felt off. I wasn’t sure why. Eventually Theo and I walked outside, leaving Alex and Rena to their respective conversations. I deflated: “Oh my GOD I feel so much better.”

Theo nodded. “Okay. Graham. I think we need to get rid of him.”

“You think? It was nice at first, but something’s started to feel off and I kinda just want to hang out with you guys now. But he seems pretty latched onto Rena even when we’ve relocated a couple times. I assume she’s happy with that…?”

“Well, she’s not into it. I pulled her aside at one point to check in and she said that she’d liked talking to him at first, but felt kinda trapped. But she says she’s fine and told me not to do anything.”

I facepalmed. “…Wait, she did?! Bro, this is just Miles and Lana 2.0. Fuck this, I wanna hang out with my friends who are visiting. Let’s go get our people.”

We went back and retrieved Alex. Graham was where we’d left him, but no sign of Rena. We ran into her outside a few minutes later, red-faced and tense: “I finally got away; I had no idea where you guys went!”

Once the four of us—and just us—were reassembled outside in an astroturfed alcove, we marveled at what had just happened. It’s not like Graham had done anything terrible. But he’d made it so that her movement was impeded by default, where she couldn’t escape without some friction. He’d claimed her.

We asked Rena what had happened, whether there might have been crossed wires.

Rena said, “I really don’t know. I wasn’t flirting with him and didn’t realize he was interested until he put his arm around me. I scooted away from him a couple times, but he just did it again, so then I felt stuck, but I didn’t want to make a scene in front of everyone, especially when I don’t know this guy or how he’ll react, and also he’d been nice so far so I didn’t want to embarrass him, and you were all still nearby talking to other people. Then I saw you two leave and I made an excuse and went to find you, but I don’t know my way around this place. Also we came to see you and I felt like he’d just decided it was me-and-him talking now.” She slowed down. “Maybe he mistook my friendliness because I’m from the Midwest…?”

Theo was livid. “What the fuck. Like, we were literally JUST talking about this. HE was just describing this. I wanna go in there and tell him off.”

Rena said she didn’t want an intervention. I added, “Also, you’re here visiting for a few hours, but I live here right now. Who would a confrontation really be for?”

He conceded. Still, I understood his impulse. I was pissed off, too. I’d really missed my friends, this whole situation had just wasted a big chunk of our evening, and we were still decompressing from it.

I’ve seen these blind spots before: people who internalize the language of empathy and self-awareness and still can’t see themselves from the outside.

But I’d never seen something so on-the-nose, this fast: paying off in minutes, with the same people, from the same conversation.

Alex and Theo were men, too, but they understood. I’d seen them not only be tested as allies—which requires far less self-knowledge—but humanize their own crushes. I’d known them both for years. Not all of this understanding had been there from the beginning, just as it hadn’t for me. We’d grown alongside each other, made mistakes alongside each other, arrived at similar realizations.

And, like Miles, Graham wasn’t young. So what was the difference?

I truly didn’t—and don’t—believe Graham meant harm. He clearly made a point to think a lot about these dynamics. But debriefing Graham’s blind spot with my friends that night was the catalyst that inspired me to write this entire series.

---

That was two weeks ago. I’ve been agonizing over how to handle this last essay—the punchline of the entire fucking series—since then. I put it aside in order to contrive just a bit of the time and distance the others had benefited from.

After I’d published Parts 1 and 2, Graham DMed me: “I like your most recent posts. Keeps reminding me of the missing stair in my old high school friend group and our failure to meaningfully corral him.”

I felt nauseous. He was engaged and supportive, and probably had no idea what was coming. But I didn’t know how to stick the landing without talking about him, and the irony of all of it. His apparent consent literacy. What happened with Rena. Now this DM.

At first, my posts had felt like shouts into a void. As more people than I’d expected messaged me or came up to me to tell me their thoughts on what I was writing, my nausea grew. I needed more distance. I needed to be really thoughtful about this. And I knew he was going to read it. I worried about how it would make him feel—about whether he’d collapse into a destructive type of shame, or build a stronger armor around himself and villainize me—both out of empathy for him, and fear for myself.

I tormented myself over his goodwill and how to respond to it. Alex stopped me: “Don’t answer. That’s just it: this DM demonstrates the whole point you’re trying to make. It’s probably a blind spot; either way, explaining won’t help him, and it is not your job, and will only distress you more.”

---

A few days later, I was offered mushrooms. The friend offering them, who knew none of this backstory, told me Graham would also be there. At first, I recoiled from this idea, but then I thought…well. I’d been trying to figure out how to be fair. To not sugarcoat, to not get pulled into “oh but he’s a nice guy”—but also to not demonize him or flatten his humanity. I’d been avoiding him since I started writing the series, and felt guilty about it. I wanted to spend time with him in order to see him with more dimensionality. So I took a light dose, to stay lucid.

I went up to the room, and Graham was already there. He opened with warm praise, wanting to talk about my series.

I died inside. Drawing tighter and tighter circles, I began trying to explain to him the ideas I was struggling to articulate for this final essay: everything I’ll say below, and more. I hoped desperately that I’d either trigger a spontaneous revelation—doubtful, but wouldn’t that be amazing—or find a way to change the subject without seeming suspicious.

I said: “You know. The only men I trust are the ones who have dug around. The ones inoculated against shock at their own closet skeletons. The ones who don’t just see themselves as the sympathetic main characters of their own story—but have considered ways in which they might have been a villain in someone else’s, in big or small ways. Even if they didn’t mean it, even if they’re not sure, even if they don’t quite remember. They’ve dug around for communicative ambiguity, found it, and wondered about it. There are very few men, and really, very few people, whom I know have really done this.”

He just kept agreeing with me.

Jude had joined us by this point, and contributed some insights: “There’s so much shame. It’s really hard for a guy to admit something even like: ‘I realized I once abused someone by accident.’ Maybe they can confess that to an individual whose nuance and goodwill they deeply trust, but the social cost of, like, posting it on Twitter? Forget it. I also kind of think it has to be forced upon you: most people need an external shock to change in that way. It has to get shoved in your face in a way you have no way of getting around. Something like that happened to me a few years ago, my whole life fell apart, and it sucked, and it was necessary for me to start learning to be a better person with a more complete view of myself, and more power over my behavior.”

I wondered whether Jude had picked up on the circles I was drawing around Graham, and was trying to help me land.

A little later, as we were coming up, Graham told Jude about a woman he was hoping to cuddle with later that night. I bristled.

“Are you sure she’s interested?”

He said, “Yeah, definitely, it’s been cute, we’ve been playing catch, back and forth—”

I cut in, unable to take it anymore. “Can I say something that may be hard to hear?”

“Sure.”

“When my friends came to visit, you were playing dodgeball with Rena. Not catch.”

“...Huh.”

He was silent for a while, clearly taken aback, but mulling it over. Then he began to speak, and, too frayed to digest his appeals, I cut him off.

“Actually, I am not going to process this with you right now. Because I think that’s actually your problem: protecting yourself from shame with your intellect, with abstractions and frameworks and rationalizations. You have many good qualities, and I believe you earnestly want to be good. What you need is to sit with this, to not try to explain it away. To let it feel gross and shitty, and let that in, so you can really learn from it, and see yourself from outside of your own head. And it’ll suck for a while, but it’ll pass. You’ll be okay. You’ll be an even better person for it.”

To his great credit—especially since the mushrooms were hitting him much harder than me, and he hadn’t anticipated the night going like this—he nodded solemnly, looked me in the eye, and said in a very steady voice, “Okay.” I could see the beginning of something dawn on his face.

I hadn’t planned to have that conversation. I felt ashamed about what I might have just subjected him to—he’d technically consented to my saying something difficult at the start of a trip, but given his shock, I don’t know how much I could call that “informed consent.” In that moment, I drew an uncomfortable parallel between Miles and myself. Either way, I knew that staying in the same room any longer would only make things worse.

I said what I hoped were reassuring parting words and walked to the door in a daze. As I opened it, Graham called out, in a sharper tone, “Can I ask something of you?”

Dread. “...Go ahead.”

“Can I ask you not to write about me?”

I stood there, doorknob in hand, thinking [Jude later told me it might’ve been a full ten seconds]. I said, “Can we circle back to this when we’re sober?”

Graham recovered the steadiness I had seen a few minutes earlier. “Okay.”

---

I went on to have a great night with an entirely different set of people, which was necessary. About four hours later, Jude came to find me; I think he’d intuited my worry.

I asked, “How’d it go? Are you both okay? I hadn’t meant to drop that on him at all, let alone when he was coming up on mushrooms. Let alone you. I worried I might’ve caught you in the crossfire.”

“Well…he kind of forced your hand. But, honestly, your timing might’ve been perfect. He had it rough for a while—maybe thirty minutes, an hour, and once or twice wanted to get into it with me, and I didn’t let him go there. But then we had a great time, his friends came and gave him some positive attention and acceptance. I think it was a healing arc.”

“Damn, thank you for the report. I’m so glad to hear that.”

That night, when I finally went to bed, I saw Graham had DMed me earlier that night: “Anna! I am no longer high. Ignore what I said before; also, thank you for the feedback.”

It was the sort of arc of self-awareness and healing I had hoped Nora could have induced, even a little, in Miles.

I felt absolved of so much of the anguish I’d been carrying for days.

Graham: thank you for surrendering to being my example. It took profound grace and courage. Like Jude said, the social and emotional cost of this sort of exposure can feel [and can be] life-ruining. I hope I’ve been as fair as I could be, and it’s my sincere hope that any fallout is localized to your own private growth. After some time, if you can forgive me, I’d like to be friends.

We all make mistakes. The goal isn’t to never make them—it’s to learn from them, to make better mistakes over time.

---

I was talking to another resident about this series, and he said, “I think, culturally, we’re taught to lump all types of shame into the same category: a pain to be avoided, to turn away from. But I think there’s actually good shame and bad shame. The bad shame just creates self-loathing, or cultivates defensiveness. It gives us incels, bigotry, virtue signaling. But there’s a good type of shame, too: the opportunity to glimpse our blind spots and shadows and begin to outgrow them. To have a hand extended to us, to give us a path back to good graces in exchange for taking accountability.”

In endeavoring to write this, I had given myself a Sisyphean task that might turn out to be impossible: to express, through words, the need for us to seek a level of insight that words alone can’t reach. Like reading everything ever written about riding a bike, instead of going out and getting on one.

At its most constructive, shame is the pain of falling off that bike, recovering, and then being a better rider.

Sometimes giving someone these frameworks makes the problem even worse: it makes them better at avoiding shame by hiding their demons. From others. From themselves. I don’t see it as a coincidence that some of the most “militant male feminists” I’ve met have done the most harm. Familiarity with consent rhetoric can make someone smoother, better at plausible deniability, harder to catch. While there are truly predatory people out there, to assume this is always deliberate is to give the perpetrator too much credit.

People can weaponize the language of nonviolent communication, spirituality, therapy speak, rationality, or different forms of activism in the same way—using it to bypass accountability, even when those frameworks are designed to get closer to truth and empathy.

Consent culture fails not because people don’t understand it, but because understanding is an insufficient intervention. The behaviors these frameworks address are appetitive, driven by biological imperatives that the conscious mind doesn’t have reliable access to, because motivated reasoning exists precisely to obscure the gap between what you want and what you believe about yourself.

Graham wasn’t being hypocritical in any way he recognized. I believe his conscious mind generated a story about why his behavior towards Rena was different from what he’d described to us earlier the same night, hence his genuine shock when I told him otherwise. Motivated reasoning can be invisible to the person doing it.

As yet another resident told me, “A lot of the guys here treat things like software problems when they’re actually hardware-level problems. They need to work on their nervous systems, and more primitive emotional assumptions, if they want to change.” People learn the framework, install it at the cognitive level, then generate sophisticated justifications for why their behavior is exempt. The framework becomes a more articulate form of camouflage.

As I discussed in Part 2 with Nora, we do this with others as well as ourselves: putting our in-group tribe first and then bending our narratives until they meet our moral standards. We hand-wave away behavior we’d otherwise find intolerable: “Oh, it was a misunderstanding, he’s really great once you get to know him.”

You can’t help what you want, but you can help what you do, which can, over time, change what you want. I believe people can change—I’m proof of that. But change has to happen at a different level than comprehension, one that doesn’t allow us to simply build logical scaffolding atop our animal wants.

---

And yet, here I’ve been: establishing frameworks across multiple essays, giving them my own names, reducing complex concepts to shorthands. The entire endeavor feels like a paradox. And it sort of is.

Simultaneously, frameworks aren’t nothing: the MeToo movement did a lot for me. Over time, it changed how I think, how I see myself, how I see other women, how I understand my experiences and the world. In its wake, I got apology messages from guys who had genuinely recontextualized things that had happened between us, because it had changed how they think, too.

So, recognizing the limitations of frameworks…here’s one more.

---

We’re all susceptible to egocentric bias: we have firsthand access to our own interiority and no one else’s. Thus, we can assume that our actions are done by “one of the good guys.” They’re justified, or at least nuanced and defensible, because they’re coming from us. This is something I’ve grappled with, myself, in writing this series.

The best illustration I have ever seen of how egocentric bias blinds us to our own consent violations comes from this 8-minute video from Youtube channel Nerdwriter1, in which the creator rearranges the sci-fi romance movie Passengers so that the love interest becomes the main character. It’s worth watching whether you’ve seen the movie or not.

The original film spends its first half hour with Chris Pratt’s character: we see his likability, his loneliness, his temptation, his suicidal agony, his hope. By the time he makes the choice at the center of the movie, the audience has been compelled to sympathize. His moral dilemma feels deeply human and widely relatable. Still, he removed, without her consent, any possible version of the life Jennifer Lawrence’s character had chosen. To fulfill his own desires, he condemned her to die alongside him, before the ship would ever arrive.

Nerdwriter1’s rearrangement not only makes for more suspenseful scenes, but completely shifts the valence of Chris Pratt and his interactions with Jennifer Lawrence: “I was genuinely surprised by just how creepy Pratt’s character is when you take away his point of view. We don’t know whether to trust him or not, believe him or not.”

The Nice Guy/Militant Male Feminist is the self-protective counterpart to the Pick-Me: both serve as insulation against having to reckon with accumulated trauma, both inflicted and received.

But I don’t want the reader to overindex on frameworks, nor on rooting out “bad apples.” Otherwise, exposing Graham would have been for nothing.

---

This essay isn’t about Graham. It’s about you. And me.

You’ve been reading this. If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve likely been nodding along. You get it. You’re one of the good ones.

Notice that feeling. That’s the feeling Graham had—and not just him. Also Nora, and probably Miles. Even Rich might have seen himself as a tormented Chris Pratt.

So why did I have to make an example of Graham at all? Because, as much as I could, I wanted to yank this out of the abstract. You, the reader, are an asymptote. You’re safe over there. I can infinitely approach you, but can never quite touch you. But I wanted to try to get as close as I possibly could from here.

In writing this, I’ve wanted to make people feel seen, and to give them language to help digest and understand their experiences of murky things. But, more than that, I’m not trying to preach to the choir. I’m hoping that I’ve written this in a way where you might be able to recognize yourself somewhere in it, or feel emboldened to take a harder look in the mirror than you might have before.

Because, Reader. Regardless of your demographics, I promise that you, too, have corners of yourself you don’t see. And so do I. It’s possible that I will look back and realize I have fucked something up in the act of writing these, despite trying my best, despite consulting with people I trust along the way.

What does it take?

It takes humility: the willingness to be wrong about yourself and sit in discomfort. It takes patience: integration over time, not just epiphany and instant absolution.

It takes cultivating healthy relationships. I have been lucky enough to find people who love me and point my own blind spots out to me when they see them. Sometimes it really hurts. But it always makes things better in the end.

It takes more than the experience of having a conversation, or reading an essay.

---

Read the entire essay series: In the Spirit, Not the Letter
Part 1: The Tyranny of Benign Advances
Part 2: The Appeal to Pity
Part 3: The Architecture of Protection: 3i, 3ii, 3iii
[^broken into three wee posts because Inkhaven was a doozy]
Part 4: One of the Good Guys