Dear Abigail,
A while ago, I met a girl in class who caught my eye. I didn’t speak to her for the first few months of the semester, until she was hired by my student newspaper. When she walked into our newsroom one day, we had a pleasant interaction. I thought she was cute, and sometime in the days after, I found a pretext to give her my number. We started talking, and I found that I really enjoyed my time with her. I rarely meet anyone I get excited about at my university. She’s 18. I’m 22. This is not something I would think twice about if it weren’t for an anonymous social media app that dominates public life at my university.
This app is the real center of gravity on my campus, and reputations can be destroyed there. I’ve watched it happen to peers of mine over things way less serious than an age gap. The girl I’m talking to is very well-known in her class. If we got together, it would reach the app pretty quickly, and they wouldn’t like it. They’d label it predatory, and I’d be staring down the barrel of a true cancellation.
I know that the threat of cancellation is seldom a good reason not to do something. But it feels like this conviction is much easier to hold when the stakes are more abstract. This isn’t occurring in the public domain; it’s in the collective imagination of a very small university where I still have to live and work. The people who would judge me are not strangers on the internet. They’re my classmates and my colleagues. How does one move forward in confidence in such a scenario?
—Tom, 22
Tom,
Risk-taking is a young man’s prerogative. The suppression of risk-taking is the suppression of men.
And yet, from the moment you were little, we padded your playground and surveilled every “playdate.” We shortened recess, forbade tackle football, and berated you for showing the slightest interest in guns. Across cultures, throughout history, boys have been fascinated by tools of violence, but if you dared sketch a crossbow, we sent you home. We pummeled you with anti-bullying lectures, then—in an act of supreme cynicism—furnished your classmates with sophisticated technological tools for bullying at scale. We encouraged your generation to inform on one another and pledged to “believe women” if you ever had conflict with one. Schools lectured you about the necessity of explicit “affirmative consent,” and warned you of the dire consequences of failing to obtain it, before you ever held a girl’s hand. No prior generation of young men was regarded with comparable hostility—tarred by the sins of Harvey Weinstein when you were 12.
And now that you’re a man, you’re expected to tear off your helmet and toss it to the wind like so much caution. As if a lifetime of conditioning could be so easily undone.
