Recently I wrote a Twitter thread about why I largely left the poetry community and now focus mostly on the editing side of things, something I take seriously and enjoy very much. Most of the reasoning, at its crux, is due to harassment. I am someone who is fairly outspoken about harassment, I try to have a good moral code and shut down bullshit when it pops up. I am also outspoken about my personal experiences with rape, mental illness, and eating disorders. When a woman* is outspoken, people use these things against her. The amount of harassment I get is outrageous. But I get that it’s going to happen. It’s a choice I make. Once, a man wrote a book of rape poems about me and other female and nonbinary poets, and when we showed our outrage at the horrific things he wrote about doing to us in excruciating detail, he dismissed it as satire and told us to stop being perpetual victims.
I used to be friends with someone who, when the going got tough, would beg men to speak out in her defense. I have done this, too. I do not do this any longer, for two reasons: I do not believe men can help me, and I resent the implication that someone will take a man, over me, seriously. Once, my rapist tried to add me on Facebook, and I asked my former partner to chew him out; he refused, not wanting to “get involved”. Once, a man I was seeing dismissed my feelings about not wanting to spend a night out with an ex that tried to kill me. He said, “Get over it, go listen to My War.” We are often made to feel we need men to stand up for us; I’m not sure why, because they rarely do.
My favorite episode of the The Sopranos is “Employee of the Month” (season three, episode four). It’s a run of the mill episode until about halfway through, when Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Braco) is brutally raped in a stairwell when leaving work. I had actually not realized, upon rewatch, what episode I was on until I saw her begin to leave work; I had to pause it in order to steel myself for the rape scene itself, which is fairly graphic, even by early 2000s HBO standards. She is severely injured by the attack, with large contusions and lacerations on her face and legs. Later, we see her using a cane to walk around.
This episode is credited to writers Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, and I am unclear who wrote what, but I will bet dollars to donuts that Robin took care of most of the rape-centric plot, because it is an all too familiar situation. At the hospital, Jennifer’s ex-husband Richard and son (I don’t remember his name because he is boring to me as a character) are infuriated on her behalf, and rightfully so. But once at home recuperating on the couch, Jennifer learns that due to an error in chain of command, the rapist was let go. I have read some critiques of the plot of this episode, but largely I disagree with them. For AV Club, Emily Todd VanDerwerff states that this plot point is not believable- but isn’t it? At what point in any process does the justice system, right down to the local police, care about rape victims at all? How many rape kits sit in an evidence room somewhere, untested? Jennifer is of course blindsided by this revelation, choosing to retreat inward; Richard, however, denies her any agency, ignoring her request to let it go by calling the precinct and demanding answers, and then loudly blowing up at her for being in that position (alone, in the stairwell of her job!), blaming her for the attack (note to anyone dealing with a loved one who has just been raped: don’t do this!).
Later, Jennifer meets with Tony (the late James Gandolfini, we miss you!) for their session and when Tony mentions he is thinking of switching to a behavioral therapist per her earlier recommendation, she says, softly, “No”. He tells her he feels like she is “giving him the boot”, and after a pregnant pause she begins to cry (Braco was nominated for an Emmy for this episode, and she deserved that nomination). Tony begins to comfort her, thinking he did something to offend or upset her. The tenderness Tony shows Jennifer in this episode seems to come from a genuine, caring place. She shies away from his hovering presence, telling him “We’ll do this, go sit over there”. Her voice is quiet. She blames her tears on her injured knee. She tells him to go on.
He doesn’t go on. He knows something is up, he knows in this moment it wasn’t a car accident that left Jennifer bruised and broken, something he had suspected in an earlier session, when her cane fell and startled her. Here, in an office where we have seen Tony demand answers or lose his temper, sometimes physically, at the slightest inconvenience, he allows Jennifer her agency, allows her to think before he asks her, “Do you want to say something?”
The camera holds her gaze for a moment. She knows who her rapist is. She knows if she asks Tony to kill him, he will do it without hesitation. She knows he is dangerous and she can use his dangerousness to her advantage. Do you want to say something?
She says, finally, “No.”
And we cut to black.
This scene has haunted me for almost twenty years. I always thought the use of the abrupt ending was breathtaking (and The Sopranos knows from cut-to-black endings!). While I have come to despise the use of graphic rape as a vehicle for plot, here it makes sense. The show is not without its violence against women (Ralphie and Christopher being some of the biggest culprits), but here Jennifer is presented what is, to her, a moral and ethical dilemma; does she have Tony kill her rapist, ensuring he is off the street and not a harm to others while also fulfilling a sense of closure that the judicial system could not? Or does she not jeopardize her relationship as Tony’s therapist, a thing he tries to convince her to do often (not to mention becoming an accessory to murder)? In the end she chooses to keep her conscience intact.
“Employee of the Month” hits differently than, say, Promising Young Woman (of which I wrote about in a previous editor’s letter), but I could not help but think about the two as a set, in the way salt and pepper shakers are a set, the same but different. In PYW, Cassie is going through her list of those who have wronged her best friend, who was raped and later kills herself, and she does sometimes rely on men to help, but not in any sort of moral, ethically charged way. Cassie hires men to position themselves as a possible attacker, or as one scene suggests, a possible hitman There is a dichotomy within these two pieces of media: violence by men in a way that hurts women, and in a way that protects or assists women. But in both PYW and “Employee of the Month”, no man dies. And in PYW, we are never shown the rape (though there is arguably a more distressing violence late in the movie).
I love that Jennifer allows herself a moment of what if (several moments, really, considering a metaphorical dream she has about the incident earlier in the episode). I love the heavy black screen that lets the viewer breathe out a breath they didn’t realize they were holding. And I am willing to bet that every rape victim who watched that episode took a moment to think what they would do if they were presented with this opportunity. It’s like 7 Year Bitch said: Dead Men Don’t Rape.
I think, ultimately, my takeaway is that yes, sometimes we need men to step up and help, to ditch their rapist buddies, to shout down any misogyny when they see it in the wild. But they need to do it because it is the right thing to do, not for their own gratification. They need to do it because so often they fail us. We need men to stop hurting us in the first place.
And I think I consider this a perfect episode because it is so extremely relatable. While Jennifer shows vulnerability throughout, this is the first time we really see her beyond a therapist for Tony (even her own therapy sessions are largely about him). In this episode Jennifer is every woman who has been hurt by a man, and failed by the men who love her, and allows herself a moment to fantasize about putting that violence back into the world.
*This is not to discredit the intersections of violence against LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and men, who also deal with these abuses with horrific regularity (and I am not ignoring the fact that women can also be rapists). Please note that I am focusing on violence against all women due to the genders presented in this episode, and my own lens and experiences as a cisgender woman.
And please note that when I say women, I mean ALL women.