I was a few weeks into a sabbatical when the story of the Access Hollywood tape broke. Alone at a writer’s retreat, I tried to limit my exposure to the news, figuring I would take to heart the invitation—elemental even to an academic sabbath—to stop and rest. Avoiding the unseemly story felt all the more necessary because my sabbatical project was an exploration of beauty, the particular contours of which I hope to explore in a future column. It was hard to reconcile my immersion in my subject with the growing realization that this vulgar tape would not, after all, doom candidate Trump’s chances.
These many months later it is a new day of reckoning. Not so much for this president who seems—forgive the foul pun—untouchable, but for powerful men from every social sector whose violations have been publicly catalogued, their reputations shattered, and their crimes no longer concealed or explained away.
It is also the beginning of Lent. And while these many months have been demoralizing, exhausting, and a hundred other things for anyone who has experienced sexual harassment or assault, I wonder if Lent makes things even more difficult. For 40 days we are asked to attend to our inner lives with rigorous self-scrutiny. I may be given to schadenfreude with each new revelation of sexual impropriety or criminality, but Lent bids me consider my own sin especially abhorrent.
