PAYBACK’S A… YOU KNOW: Maybe Men Will Be Scared for a While. “But maybe to fear women is to begin seeing them as people.”

Not everyone is online all the time. This is why it was only several weeks after the “Shitty Media Men” list first appeared, and disappeared, and engendered a frenzy of coverage that my husband found himself discussing the list with an older colleague.

Well, she said (as he recounted the conversation to me). Women have been scared of men for a long time. Maybe men will be scared of women for a while now.

He recounted this as a calm statement of fact, which interested me; it seemed accurate, and it also seemed like a stark contrast to the way I’d seen similar assessments delivered elsewhere. In general, in the weeks following the Times’ and The New Yorker’s reports on Harvey Weinstein, the prospect of men being newly scared of women tended to loom as a sort of horrifying, unnatural worst-case scenario. What if men were now too scared to take meetings with women? Too scared to professionally mentor women? Too scared to be friendly? Too scared to flirt? The price of any misstep: a life “ruined” (although what, exactly, it meant to “ruin” a life tended to pass without scrutiny).

Implied in these scenarios was less a fear of women’s power than a fear of their irrationality, their suggestibility, and their failures of understanding. The subtext seemed to be: So are women just going to get upset about whatever now? Are they going to start reporting men for “misconduct” willy-nilly, ignoring all subtleties and good intentions in favor of freaking out?

So far there are plenty of indicators pointing to Yes.