Given constraints on women’s behavior, she retains her purity, her appropriate female lack of erotic feeling. She gets to announce that she is attractive, as women are supposed to be, but she is not attracted, as women are not supposed to be. But what if she was attracted to him and did show it, and won’t acknowledge that? And he doesn’t want to live with the “he hit on me” narrative. As a writer, I know that there is, after all, the right to be described accurately. What he wants is the “I was attracted to him but I wouldn’t acknowledge it, so I got confused” version. We don’t have language
...more