Catch and Kill

Catch and Kill (2019) by Ronan Farrow

Genre: Investigative journalism that exposed so many layers of corrupt power within America’s elites that it was partially responsible for sparking one of the most significant movements of this century.

Recommended for: Someone who gets a thrill out of seeing the thread pulled at the possibility of justice but also has the stomach for discovering just how disgusting the rot of corruption is and how that rot affects real, individual people who, as a result, can barely live with themselves.

Read here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

We certainly talk about anger in this country, but I think we could stand to talk about it more or talk about it differently.

Men’s feelings become a crisis in America because we are aware that those feelings ultimately can dictate a direction that we are all forced to go along with. So, whether the crisis is real or not, based on the actual external circumstances that any people or institutions within a society could actually do anything about, we all must still fret at the idea of the crisis that these feelings could theoretically represent. Because whether or not the phenomenon at hand is legit, too many men feeling one way, will lead to life-or-death consequences.

That is why you hear about a male loneliness crisis. All people are lonelier because capitalism has invested in technologies that keep people isolated because there is less money to extract from community. Half of those people are men. Additionally, many of those young men have been taking cues from hyper-masculine grifters who encourage them to treat women poorly. This has, of course, a counterintuitive impact on their ability to have any meaningful relationships with women, emotionally or physically. So, sure, all put together, they are likely lonelier. But where this falls on the spectrum between self-inflicted and “epidemic” is perhaps a litmus test of where you start treating someone like a grown-up.

You hear a lot about men being angry, too. You see their anger. That one is historically evergreen. Much of what has happened in the world has been the aftermath of men’s anger. And to be clear, men’s anger is a very scary thing. It is uncontrollable and entitled. It’s a bit too easy to point at January 6 as an example (though that is definitely men’s anger), but the most progressive men get angry and become horrible. And depending on the temperature of society, it is because Men Are Angry Right Now, perhaps for the same reasons that men are lonely or for some other grievance.

There is another point that I think is probably obvious. I’m not sure how anyone with a remotely enlightened or intelligent perspective could disagree. That point is that women, historically and currently, have more to be angry about. They are more often undermined. They are more often overlooked. They are more often expected to fill certain roles that they did not choose for themselves. If they do not appear to be what is perceived of as conventionally attractive, they are made aware of that from a young age and for the rest of their life are given reminders of how that affects their worth. If they do appear in a way that is perceived of as conventionally attractive, they are also made aware of that from a young age and they are preyed on by men in a way that is both confusing from an identity standpoint and literally scary from a safety standpoint. It goes without saying that this has been nowhere near a complete list why women, generally speaking, have reason to be angry.

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Reading Catch and Kill will, I should certainly hope, make you extremely angry.

I should caveat that by saying that I am a man. So, that is the predominant feeling I felt. And I don’t mean that to refer to a default male trigger for anger. I only mean that a woman reading it might have a whole slew of accompanying feelings beyond just anger. The original reporting behind the book led to what would become the #MeToo movement, so that in and of itself implies that many women read it with a sense of pained familiarity.

The book is thrilling at times in that Farrow makes clear he wants to get to the bottom of all this disgusting business of powerful Hollywood men taking advantage of women only to learn that the coverup coming for him is bigger than he can imagine.

Obviously, Harvey Weinstein is the big, bad monster in this book. You didn’t need to read it to know that he is a horrible person. That news has likely reached you - though the details laid out in the book will move him up a notch in your rankings of people who should never get a good night’s sleep for the rest of their lives. But I found myself most angry with all the cowards who went out of their way to stop Farrow from exposing Weinstein. People working for respected institutions. These are people who, when you learn about what they chose to do when they had choices in front of them, make you feel like you are helpless in a cruel world.

The book is about justice at its core, but I would hope that the anger that anyone feels is less about retribution and more about empathy. Imagining these women and what they are going through, which Farrow lays out, is painful as a reader. That might sound naive to any woman reading this, but it is painful and that is how anger ultimately is handled responsibly: like something you have to feel, as opposed to something you have to recklessly make someone else’s problem.

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We become attuned to anger with the wrongs we see directed at the people we love. Microaggressions or sexism toward or underappreciation of your partner by others can make you want to stand up for them and when you can’t you become angry. As a man, the hardest thing in the world is to know that your partner (or daughter or sister) is special but acknowledge that their circumstance isn’t.

It’s happening to other women. Whatever it is. That is why the movement was called #MeToo. It is important for men to not treat collective problems like individual problems, especially when men are the ones perpetuating the problems onto women.

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You’ll get angry a lot these days if you’re someone with compassion and you keep up with current events. It’s not an unhelpful feeling. It creates urgency in us. But it’s dangerous.

Anger directs itself, but never at solutions or productivity. If you want the bad guy to suffer, good luck. The bad guy has been dodging suffering through people far better at being angry than you. And a bad guy is waiting behind him. If you want to solve the problem, maybe you can angrily push through the thing that you want. But you are bound to have the tunnel vision to push down someone doing the work longer and smarter than you in the process.

If you’re angry because someone is suffering, then the thing that has never failed is to give your attention over to that suffering. Never lose sight of the fact that there is a victim still on the other end of it all, if you are lucky enough to not be that victim. That is the thing. Work your way from there and up. Any action or policy that compromises that suffering person isn’t worth it.

Anger is a feeling worth feeling. Don’t act to avoid feeling it. Act because you know how what the feeling means.

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