Making his excuses for him

Over the long weekend, I read 'No words for this' by Ali Mau. It was profound, and it's helping me process the world right now. Tricky themes lie ahead, so read with care.

It's been a while since I was a (barely) trendy leftie undergrad, hanging out in the Otago University common room in my green woolly jersey and Doc Martens - smoking Holiday 20s, drinking fifty cent dishwater-quality coffee, and timidly opining on academics whose work I hadn't properly read.

The 90s were odd times. To go to university, to be exposed to political ideas for the first time, was a revelation for a kid like me. Feminism offered some of the most revelatory ideas of all. I'd arrived at Otago with the romantic notions of the first of her family to attend: expectations of ivory-covered, eyebrows-raised-intellectually fancy fucking whatever. Those notions didn't pan out, exactly, but the closest I felt to them was always in the outdoor corridor between the student union and the library, an exposed concrete strip where falling leaves rotted and became slippery, and which has since been covered over by an elaborate building with real coffee and a merchandise shop.

A revelation: but even so, for all that feminism I devoured, I didn't know what I was meant to do when men I didn't like talked over me or touched me. And so I did nothing. But I did know what I was meant to be, skinny and entertaining and unassertive, whatever my photocopied course readings said. You could reject patriarchal capitalism, mostly, but it was hard not to watch Friends, because everyone did. Each of the women on the show had a female type - one uptight, one spoilt, one ditsy - but they all shared a body, thin and white, cut and pasted. We all laughed, because it was a comedy.

It was at university that I first learned about the hero of the left, Noam Chomsky. Men explained him to me. He was just the kind of academic we'd debate in the common room.

Not long after those common room days, I joined a left-wing political party, and I stuck with it for the next few years, through the fundraising and pamphleteering and bloviating. The guy who attacked me was a party member. All the party leaders already knew he was a danger - except for the woman amongst them, who flatly denied a comrade could be capable. None of the leaders did anything, about me or the other women. I wrote them an angry email and eventually got a grudging response: did I want the guy kicked out of the party?

I didn't, I replied. I just wanted him to stop hurting people.

Noam Chomsky corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, long after Epstein's first conviction, and when he was facing new allegations of sex trafficking. Epstein asked Chomsky's advice on how to respond. Chomsky, hero of the left, replied:

What the vultures dearly want is public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts ...

... That's particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.

Things are complicated by the fact Chomsky had a serious stroke in 2023. His wife has replied on his behalf to the release of the files. Chomsky didn't know the extent of Epstein's offending, she said. He supports the women's movement. He was simply taken in: this man with a global reputation, a decades-long history of critical thinking, and - Jesus - typing fingers and an internet connection.

Some supporters on the left have rushed to add to the excuses. Chomsky is well-intentioned. He's spoken out against every transgression from Vietnam to Israel. He simply got duped, a victim of his own good nature. It's like there's a ledger, and the man's good works have earned him some kind of credits he now gets to spend on misogyny.

For what it's worth, I don't want Chomsky hung, drawn and quartered. He is culpable, but he's also a creature of the culture and institutions, the rewards and sanctions, around him - a man who managed to convince himself his own kind of sycophancy and grift put him a cut above the other sycophants and grifters.

But I want to point out this. Chomsky's language of hysteria is precisely the language that belittles victims, diminishes them, makes them fear to come forward. It is language that perpetuates abuse. He knew that, because he is not a stupid man. The guy who hurt me, and the others who defended him, knew it too.

An opponent's misogyny does only a fraction of the damage of the misogyny of friends.

We're in an ass-backwards conversation about sexual harm. When heroes like Chomsky falter, we must make them monsters, blaming them 100%, so there's no guilt left to share amongst the rest of us - or we must blame them not at all, to save ourselves from looking like fools who chose the wrong heroes. Either way, we're dodging the hard conversation - and when we do that, we're neither honouring past victims nor preventing future ones.

Years on, I know my mind and cherish it, and I've even raised two beautiful boys into men - but my position hasn't changed.

I don't want Noam kicked out. I just want him, and others like him, to stop hurting people.