JoAnn Wypijewski didn’t mean to end up writing about crime when she started writing about sex. What first attracted her writerly curiosity was desire, and pleasure—‘the possibilities for it, the absolute necessity of attention to it as part of any radical politics, the meaning of and conditions for it, the substance of intimate life.’ But events intervened: the aids epidemic, the Culture Wars, homophobic violence, paedophilia in the Church, the Central Park Five, Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo. And if your beat is sex and culture, as Wypijewski observes in What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo, writing about crime is what happens. Nearly thirty years of essays and reporting are on offer here, many from the Nation, where she was a longtime editor and writer (she’s also on nlr’s editorial committee).

A proponent of old-fashioned values like intellectual scepticism and inner toughness, animated by visions of freedom more than censoriousness, Wypijewski doesn’t ‘believe all women’, that contemporary litmus test, and questions whether thirty-year-old memories should be legally dispositive. When feminism as such comes up in discussion, the qualifier ‘white’ will often be attached; though sexual politics is the field of inquiry, as per the book’s title, class and race continually turn out to be more determinative categories than gender as such. In Wypijewski’s astringent assessment, the feminist reformers operating under the #MeToo hashtag not only overlook important ideas about freedom and justice; they also forget to figure capitalism into their political calculations. The campaign displays too palpable an enthusiasm for punishment—and, foregrounding black women’s experience (‘one in two black women loves someone who’s in jail’) there’s no liberation to be had in ratcheting up criminalization. Too many diverse behaviours have been herded under the umbrella of ‘sexual abuse’, with summary judgements rather than due process for the accused. Worse, moral panics, including the protracted one we’ve been living through, don’t even require their accused to be guilty.

‘Young activists raising the banner of #MeToo are not to blame for this world of punishment and fear. They did not make it. But every human alive is responsible to history’, Wypijewski writes. ‘We inherit it, and will bequeath whatever it is we do with it.’ She is equally critical of the carceral proclivities of supposed progressives who once distrusted zero-tolerance policies and law-and-order platforms. As she says pointedly of all citizens a little too eager to lock men up—usually poor and black men—and then joke knowingly about what happens in the showers: ‘rape is a heinous crime, except when wished upon those accused of it’. She is dubious, too, about victims’ rights movements, where in her view ‘the sympathetic aspect of the victim’ often obscures the real function of the campaigns: ‘to assert vengeance as a social good’.

Given the accusatory zeal of the moment, left feminism this unapologetic is an increasingly endangered species. Wypijewski remains a proponent of the liberationist energies of the twentieth-century counterculture, even as the twenty-first century frogmarches us towards what the anthropologist Roger Lancaster has called ‘poisoned solidarities’. The term names that ‘communal feeling forged from the negative energies of fear, suspicion, vigilance’, deploying ‘shunning and punishment as empowering, unifying goals.’ Wypijewski’s view of human nature can be no less sharp and bleak, as when she analyses the reflexes that drive ‘the crowd’: ‘Anticipating retribution enlivens people regardless of ideology, and has accelerated into ordinary, terrible fun.’

In prose that pirouettes between the journalistic, the polemical and the lyrical, Wypijewski aims to disrupt today’s habitual scripts about sex, to insist upon the moral conundrums that lurk within our presumptions of guilt and culpability. ‘The terrain gets slipperier’, she argues, ‘when you think for a moment about the real way people have sex—the way risk arouses and arousal subordinates thoughts of risk, the way shame influences almost any discussion of desire, the way denial is always, always at work.’ Wypijewski has been on the scene for nearly every iconic scandal of the last three decades: sometimes as a cultural critic—there are chapters here on Madonna and on the artist David Wojnarowicz—but more frequently in the courtrooms as a reporter, interviewing claimants and key figures, digging up the facts, going through the documents, relitigating the cases. The more demonized the accused, the more they interest her, and a long procession of such loathed figures marches through these pages. Against the mainstream press’s condescension, Wypijewski insists that they are human, too.

Even Harvey Weinstein gets the benefit of the doubt, contrasted to a parody of liberation that has resorted to ‘making monsters, and caging them’. Citing the prosecutors’ depiction of Weinstein (‘deformed’, ‘abnormal’, ‘intersex’, ‘disgusting’, ‘fat’, ‘hairy’) she comments: ‘Never has body shaming and the “normal” trap been so wielded as a weapon of presumed progressive justice.’ Wypijewski’s suspicions are aroused by uniformity of opinion; where there’s social agreement, she presents the counter-intuitive take: ‘It is now accepted as fact that Weinstein is a violent criminal. He may be, but in actual fact we don’t know.’ He ‘basked in the bully role, but his descent would be more satisfying if did not rely simultaneously on conviction by say-so.’ Actual guilt or innocence is irrelevant in these processes, because panic follows its own logic. The concept is a central one for Wypijewski. She defines it as a social eruption, fanned by the media, characterized by alarm over innocence imperilled (the archetype: white women and children). The predator, a mutable presence, figures as a menace against which the populace must be mobilized. In a sex panic, Wypijewski writes, definitions collapse: ‘abuse’ can mean a comment, a caress, a violent act; rape, ‘a terrible and serious crime’, is conflated with behaviour that may not be criminal at all.

Lynndie England represents the obverse case: a low-ranking white woman charged with bringing the system into disrepute. One of the defendants in the Abu Ghraib prison-torture scandal, she was indicted for her role in sexually humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners for the sake of pornographic photo ops. For Wypijewski, the story ‘is, as in every tragedy in which human weakness collides with historical force, a more tangled thing’. She cites the evolution of us torture policy from Afghanistan to Guantánamo to Iraq, the ‘cruelty exemptions’ won by the cia and others. England, apparently under the sway of a charismatic boyfriend, the actual torture-porn mastermind, was a private, the lowest ranked soldier involved (only twenty-one at the time), yet charged with the most crimes. Why? Because America is a torture state, and England made a conveniently culpable stand-in for military corruption. It’s not that America doesn’t torture, it just won’t countenance getting caught torturing for fun.