Originally titled One Year On: The Consequences of Betrayal. Updated with very small corrections Dec 2012.
Three years ago [from Dec 2012], I was in an abusive relationship.
No, that’s not right.
Three years ago I was emotionally attacked.
I was set up and played, for fun.
“It’s so horrible what happened to you,” said a friend to me at lunch.
“Why, what happened?” asked a new acquaintance.
Ten second pause.
“I was tricked.”
The most humiliating sentence I've ever spoken in my life.
It's funny. I used to pride myself on my shrewdness but now I realise how naive I am, how stupidly trusting, how innocently attackable - how easy to knock down and infect with fear and horror. I have written about these issues throughout my career yet when it happens inside the circle of my own life, I am devastated. The perpetrator is famous for being a 'nice guy' on the left, as are all the other perpetrators in this piece. He, and they all, have acted with impunity and are abusing women as I write.
A very close friend of mine was played for over a year. She described it later as “emotional violence.” I watched, over the following six years, as my friend’s trust and happiness were replaced with something wired and watchful. It’s called cheating not because specific rules have been broken but because the lover has been cheated out of their good faith, their trust, their delight and their peace of mind. Of course, in time, she recovered and rebuilt herself. But she lost the career that she loved: she had been an exceptionally gifted film-maker working in equal partnership with her ex, in the company they created. When the revelation came it was too humiliating to go to meetings, knowing that everyone knew. There was a particular look people had - of revolting open-eyed pity for her, but no censure at all for him. Seeing that 'liberal' industry for the abuse protection racket that it really was poisoned her career. She was punished for being a victim and he was rewarded for being a perpetrator. The perks and job offers went to him and she was frozen out. Her ex’s career flourished. He was awfully embarrassed, though not remorseful, and it was all rather a mess, but he enjoyed himself, the affair and the special tang of betraying his partner. He is now rich, famous, thriving, happy and busy. She left the country.
The phrase “emotional violence” stayed with me. At the time I thought she was talking out of her immediate devastation, but I now understand. The pain is physical. I didn’t realise that my skin would crawl night and day, that I would feel nauseous, that my muscles would be tense and that, if I heard the perpetrator being praised as an unbelievably lovely guy (as I do often), my heart would pound and feel as though a metal vice was squeezing it, I would go hot and cold, then start sweating, shuddering and retching. I realise now that these are trauma and stress responses. I didn’t know there would be a feverish restlessness and that my skin would feel as if it was being cut across the surface. I remember standing in the shower, feeling my back burning, certain that it was running with blood, slashed in a diamond pattern. I accepted every invitation, every work offer no matter how pointless and exhausting, because whenever I was alone, my skin crawled in one piece.
After that I felt numb and heavy for a year, as if my limbs were made of lead. I only wanted to be alone. My skin crawled when I was with people.
And then it was all just cold, and grave, and realistic, and even. I see clearly. I see him thrive. I see that I have fallen; at some point in the last three years I hit the glass ceiling. And the oppressors there, and his apologists and allies and champions, were all the same people.
“I’d say it took ten years to get over.” “My friend had always looked really young and then she was cheated on and overnight she looked exactly her age.” “After six weeks, when I phoned to check she wasn’t dead, she said, ‘I’ll live. Just.’” “I’d say it took…five years?... to feel like myself again. It’s just the thought that I didn’t even figure in his thoughts. What it would do to me…” “Even now, five years on, I wonder if it’s something I did.” “Don’t be embarrassed. I still talk and think about what happened to me, five years later.” These are all quotes from women I know, all strong, all different, with different lives and personalities, none of them stupid or naïve. They are amazing women.
My own quote was, “I used to be quite easygoing about that sort of thing, until it happened to me. Now I think it’s like taking a life.”
The last few years have been good for infidel pickings: Gordon Ramsay, Vernon Kaye, Wayne ‘john’ Rooney, Avram ‘john’ Grant, Sting/john, Hugh/johnjuncter Bonneville, David/johnjuncter Schneider, Ashley Cole, Tiger Woods, Mark Owen, that blaring red chap from the One show. Whenever a story breaks I feel my skin itch all over with the desire to out the ones I know. All are well known in their industries, fawned over by slavish women, promoted and aided by other men, said by all (including themselves) to be decent, liberal, ‘lovely’, stand-up, caring guys.
A colleague of mine cheated on his pregnant wife but was described as “a dear” by a female colleague when I, instinctively rattled by his vibe, privately asked her if he was “a good guy” or not. Later he helped his own image by talking about how much he loves his baby; if a woman did that in the workplace she’d be dismissed as a lightweight who couldn’t keep her mind on her job. Indeed, at a NUJ conference last year one woman recounted how a female colleague had been slandered heavily when she answered a family emergency call: “They said, ‘That’s a woman who should be producing a programme, not dealing with her kid.’’” Yet a male colleague in the same situation was cooed over: “They kept saying, ‘He’s such a great dad.’”
There are three poets: one is O, an erudite, high culture young Turk type, a kind of young fogey, short, wordy, with pretensions to greatness. The second is L, a wily Londoner, loose and warm and friendly, a little buzzed, streety and voluble. The third is S, a salt of the earth type, accessible and germane, frank in manner (though not actually honest, obviously), who, like all philanderers, writes marvellous odes to his wife. There was another colleague, a handsome man whose mistreatment of women was so well-known that once, when reception called him and said there was a courier downstairs with a package, a couple of (male) colleagues laughed and said, "It's a lawyer with a briefcase full of paternity suits." Not knowing this, I complained to this guy during a friendly conversation about one of the poets, who had repeatedly betrayed and deceived a friend of mine (and all the women he betrayed her with) for years. The guy laughed immediately in easy dismissal. "O? O's a fuckin' lovely guy."
From the other side of the glass ceiling I watch them collect all the awards the world has to give. I watch them act craftily to gain the assistance of women and also help and excuse and cover for other men. I see women grovel and defer. There is the columnist and film-maker, J, who, again (spotting a theme?) has helped his own career through writing about his family life, as though he’s some hapless dad just bumbling along delightedly in the realm of the women and the babies. He has been cheating on his wife since their son was little. There is the publishing guy, Jamie, who went straight up to a friend of mine at a reading and said the following: “Hello! I’m Jamie Grope, my wife lives in the country, my mistress lives in London. Do you want to be mistress number two?” Ten years later, not knowing this, he contacted me for a work project and I sat through the meeting, the bile rising in my throat, as he sat with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest and a load of hairy uncooked-pastry wan skin oozing out and talked about his ‘fantastic’ wife, who always looks as miserable as shit whenever I see her. Oh, and his ‘great’ daughter too, of course. Sometime between those two days he sacked an incredibly competent friend, who had been rising steadily in his publishing company, when she was on maternity leave.
Everyone knows about this guy; nobody does anything at all. If we all withdrew, he would have no career and he would rightly be reduced to nothing – since he has treated his wife, daughter and countless other women as nothing. But he flourishes. Neither men nor women step away from him. He called a meeting at which were present two close personal friends of his: one of the cheating poets I mentioned above, and a colourful British Asian broadcaster who has had a sexual harassment case proven against him and whose wife left him after he betrayed her – although, thinking back, I realise that when he was actively betraying her I met him and he made the entire room look at him lovingly, as if he was a good man, as he described the birth of his daughter: “I didn’t even care what happened to the baby, I just couldn’t stand you see my wife in that much pain.” Well – you’d know about inflicting pain, right? Being formally reprimanded for sexual harassment and being divorced for betraying a woman has not taught this man any respect for women. I was speaking on a panel with him at the Southbank. I walked in and he said, "Love the gloves! Can I - ooh - can I just smell one?" We were being briefed by the chair of the panel, an extremely eminent and pioneering women, and halfway through something she was saying about the theme of the event (contemporary international affairs) he interrupted, "Now, Jill*, don't pretend you don't want us to notice you've had a haircut. Very sexy." She took a deep unsmiling breath, paused for a few seconds looking flatly at him in silence, and then continued with what she'd been saying. He didn't notice or care. When I complained about the man to a Southbank colleague later they said, "Believe me, that's the very least of what Jill's had to put up with." This sexual harassment, belittlement, patronage, objectification and derailing of women, often by so-called 'liberal' men is completely common.
Now that the scales have dropped from my eyes I’ve been horrified by the hypocrisy, deceit and protectionism which surrounds these people. They are abusive men, nothing more, acting with forethought, secrecy, control, coldness and multiple simultaneous victims. Their victims are women, not men. The fact that they pretend, at the same time, to be feminists, in order to attract then attack the women who will give them the greatest humiliation-kick, compounds the unspeakable nastiness of their misogyny. Meanwhile, the misogyny of the beholders runs so deep that they just don’t care how much these men abuse, because their women victims are not human, it seems. Women are not even animals, for if any of these men had been witnessed mistreating a dog or a cat, people would be appalled. I have sat back in astonishment as ‘nice guys’ easily, happily praise and defend abusive men, in comically identical language. In fact I have never heard any man describe another man as 'wonderful' except when the second man was abusive towards women.
Chap: “George Best, what a wonderful, wonderful footballer. My father [who was a doctor] treated him, you know.”
Me: “For alcoholism, or for wifebeating?”
Chap (reddening): “Oh – for alcoholism.”
About V S Naipaul, who I witnessed at a book reading openly jeering at any woman who asked a question about his work, a male colleague said, “Yes, he was a rotter to women wasn’t he but my God, what wonderful, wonderful books.”
It is fashionable to say that for all the men who cheat, an equal number of women ‘must’ also be cheating in the same way, deceiving and gameplaying in the same way, as though the world is completely symmetrical and level practically, economically, symbolically, morally, socially, culturally and in terms of power, freedom, judgement, choice, values and emancipation. In twenty years of watching and putting all the pieces into place I have known no serial female cheats and countless serial male cheats who are old enough to know better and viciously abuse their partners' trust without a second thought.
Of course I have witnessed messy situations in which neither sex comes out well at all: sordid affairs that cause ‘everything’ to fall apart, cheaters and cheatees of both sexes behaving in humiliating and cruel ways, various pickles too predictable to go into. I’m not talking about making one little mistake, or casual dating, or seeing a few people, or great love affairs that happen across decades, or the one night stand that finally ends an already long-dead relationship, or the stuff you do in your 20s when you’re just hanging out. I’m talking about serial, dedicated two-facers, backstabbers, double life livers, gameplayers, deceivers. I'm talking about callous deliberate ongoing repeat traitors. And as for those who, desperate to excuse these men’s abusiveness and blame female victims, argue that the deceived women ‘must’ know, ‘on some level’, no, no, they don’t know. They are decent human beings who act in good faith, demonstrate sincere love, give time, attention, affection and labour to those they love, and trust them.
This is not about the confusions of sex or love; it is about power and hate. It is in this world and by these people that women artists’ work is ignored, talked down and sneered at. They will never help women, in private or in public, and it is my realisation of this, and the fact that so many of the abusers know and help each other, which has led to my despair. There is no point in me writing books or pitching documentaries or lobbying for more women in the areas I work in. That is the long consequence of my friend’s brief backstab: the total destruction of everything. In the classic phrase, I (and so many other women) am running as hard as I can to stay in the same place, and every so often the glass ceiling looms up and smacks me in the face. Meanwhile the real business, with all its corruption and injustice, its abuse and hypocrisy, is happening elsewhere. The prizes and opportunities and perks and places are being exchanged far from here, behind our backs, over our heads, while we are looking the other way... or even just in front of our faces.
Even when I have outed abusers to colleagues, the colleagues do not then refuse to work with the abusers. I have been told that what I am saying is trivial, bitter, unimportant, petty, untrue, mistaken, malicious, one-sided, extreme or hysterical. Yet these men and women would, I am sure, hate to be treated in the way I have described. Meanwhile, the petty, gratuitous slandering of innocent women is endemic in public life and general conversation, as is the silencing, attacking, punishing, disbelieving and blaming of women victims.
When I have confronted the abusers myself they have laughed in my face because they know that their abuse is not only protected but rewarded by both sexes. To them, women are groupies, admin assistants, maids, enablers, secretaries, cleaners, free prostitutes, caregivers and other types of exploitable, highly efficient and uncredited labour. We are not artists, intellectuals or equals. If they respected us and thought that we were human beings, they would not abuse us. These media types, politics types, arts and culture types, they're never going to play any role in fighting discrimination against women, or marginalisation, or the double standard, or rape culture, or 'domestic' violence, or mental abuse, because they are perpetrators and apologists themselves, in broadsheets and in bedsheets.
After that first discovery I discovered many more, the majority perpetrated by those who sit in offices and give interviews talking in a nice, liberal, egalitarian way, while constantly sabotaging and undermining women in the most intimate, savage and destructive ways. It was devastating to learn, through experience, the ubiquity and connectedness of professional discrimination, personal mistreatment and cultural excusal, of perpetrators covering for each other and assisting each other’s careers. These men don't "love" women, as emotional abusers forgivingly say of themselves. They hate them. If you spend years playing women, tricking women, duping women, lying to women, using women, you are an abusive man.
I could never look my ‘friend’ in the eye again. That was the most painful thing – the speed with which the person I most wanted to see became the person I least wanted to see, the one I dreaded seeing, the one whose name made me feel physically sick. When I walk down a street or enter a party I scan it to check he's not there. Once I worked my way down through all the various layers of deceit - the shifting storylines, fudges, feints, conditions and tales a liar has to tell to keep themselves steady on wobbly ground - there was nothing left. He lied about everything and all I knew, in the end, was his name. Everything he did was part of the game, step by careful step, move by move: the first email, the first letter, the first gift, all came from him. Done with expert ease. It is dizzying to contemplate the massive distance between that kind, beautiful and intelligent face and the incredible sadism behind it. How could anyone do that - set up and abuse dozens of women at the same time? And how is it that apart from some surface static electricity, a bit of hubbub, there was no ill consequence for him in the outer world? He flourished. Women and men flocked to serve and enable him, to invite him onto projects, shortlists, trips, commissions, jaunts, perks, jobs and events in which he was one of eight men (with a token lady of course). Everything was given to him and, typically, he took everything he could get.
There is the appalling knowledge that he is doing it to many other women and I cannot warn them because no-one believes me. There is the steepness of his hypocrisy and the psychosis of his pretence, in which the mask doesn't slip for one moment. Serial killer by night, pillar of the community by day.
The obscenity resides here: how could he laugh, talk, joke and socialise with such clear-eyed cheerfulness? How could he deceive, plan, enjoy, act? How could he say all those things? How could he write love letters he didn't mean? How could he pretend to be a nice guy? How could he set up, sexually exploit and deceive those women and make it look like they were mad when they instinctively sensed something was wrong? The women are sexually used and emotionally used, fed constant lies at the same time as being sabotaged and betrayed. How could he foster and use a woman's love, pretend to cherish it, pretend to feel it mutually, use it as a smokescreen as he abused her trust, then throw it back in her face?
To experience the effects of betrayal is to have everything in one’s life destroyed but not rebuilt. As Michelle Margherita has written, "Anyone who's ever been cheated on understands the noose of grief that constricts your heart and steals your breath. The emotional pain becomes physical. Your heart literally aches...It was amazing how quickly the toxic dust of betrayal fell over my life. ...Worst of all was the overwhelming sense of loss, rage and confusion that lived in my chest..." And as Alex Heminsley writes in a frank piece in Elle some issues back, “Suddenly, I doubted my own judgement, questioning the motives of all those who loved me most, and disbelieving their kindest words. I was consumed by anxiety about what other mistakes I might make.”
To experience betrayal is not only to be maliciously and deliberately deceived for one period in one setting by one person The effects go far beyond the incident and are enmeshed in a wider culture which does not punish abuse but excuses and even rewards it and attacks victims when they speak about having been attacked.
I do not understand these people. Surely it takes much more effort to play and mess women around than to be a nice, clear, decent human being? How can it be that everything you have claimed about yourself is a lie, everything you do is part of a gigantic game and every way you present yourself is a front to facilitate your mistreatment? You are not 'troubled souls' or damaged victims who do not know what they're doing. You know exactly what to do to advance yourself publicly, how to play women in secret and make sure nobody finds out and how to ensure that the women themselves don't find out that they are being mistreated at the same time as other women. You know how to talk publicly and give feminist quotes for female friends' books on gender and female colleagues' articles about women's rights. You know how to charm those you want to charm and mistreat those you want to mistreat, and when, and where, and with what actions and words, repeatedly, over time.
There is C, the award-winning science fiction writer whose entire public persona is built on his ‘great’ women characters, his sturdy leftist politics, his fairness, his niceness, his strength, his gentle manner, his intelligence, his articulacy, his productiveness, his decency and solidity, his integrity and the way he mentions his sister, partner, niece and late mother in interviews and acknowledgements and occasionally, once in a while, even shows (or claims) that he has read one or two books by women too. C, I think that you yourself would not like to be targeted, set up, elaborately coerced, teased, led on, misled, bribed, sexually used, emotionally abused, taken advantage of, manipulated, exploited, betrayed, lied to and deceived, alongside dozens of others and hundreds of submissive self-hating groupies, simultaneously, all over the world, in addition to a permanent subordinate groupie spouse. Why do that to women, while talking softly, blinking gently, standing diffidently and pretending every second that you are a decent human being, a principled thinker on the side of equality, a supportive brother, A Marxist Socialist blah whatever, a good teacher, a loving uncle, a feminist, a stalwart friend, a doting partner, a Boycott Israel movement activist?
Because of you, C, I can no longer say I have never been in an abusive relationship, although the word 'relationship' makes my stomach turn as it hints at some kind of dynamic or mutuality instead of a perpetrator targeting and victimising a stranger. You were not any kind of relationship and this was not some romance but a drive-by shooting, a hit and run, a hard lesson taught to a stranger, a knifing by a passer-by. I told my mother about you and showed her the thousands of words of sly texts, endless coercive lie-filled emails and even carefully crafted and crafty handwritten letters you tried to coerce me with (Do you use a template for your letters? Or does it give you a bigger abuse-kick to tailor each one to the recipient? How do you remember what you have sent to whom? Is that why you had three phones, an ancient Nokia and two iPhones?), including the classic line, "You ask if I am playing you. No defensiveness intended, but how would that work exactly?" C, it would work by teasing, compulsive and pathological lying, mercenary professional exploitation, manipulative mental games, sexual exploitation, hypocrisy, control, sadism, repeated and sustained deception. My mother, a writer and academic, said, "He writes fantasy stories, doesn't he? He created a fantasy persona for himself: the little boy lost. He uses it to trick women. And he targets the clever ones. Because bringing down someone strong is the greater triumph. He uses his looks to deceive women - not a good look but a hurt, vulnerable look. I used to think there was something more to it with him but now I think he's just a piece of rubbish."
C, you ....I can barely write this... you pretended to be shy, unworldly, innocent, hesitant, awed and delighted. And while you did that to me, you did it to many other women. You wrote that when I gave you compliments, you read them "with a kind of stuttering shy delight." You wrote that it was "life-changing, when that door opened." "Your worst fears about me are not true." "I have never, in my life, so enjoyed waking up with someone." "I like how I am with you. I play when I'm with you. I never usually play." "I love that you notice me - I love that you notice things about me." "That [token] was the most affecting presented ever, and no-one can take it away from me." "The way you kiss me..." "I'm not a sadist, I'm not a sociopath. I'm not a sadist, I'm not a sociopath." "Just got your letter. I cannot even believe what you are. Brace for comeback." "Oh my sweet thing, oh my gorgeous girl." "Have a good day, my taut-skinned doe." "I have been going around my room smelling all the places you've been. I caught myself breathing through the T-shirt you wore like a diver breathing through a regulator." "I'm sorry. I'm smitten. I'm gone on you."
I participated, responded, initiated, invited, answered, with absolutely equal ardour, but for one thing: I meant what I said, and you did not. You know me, but I do not know you. You are a stranger. What terrifying duplicity. When I finally confessed to a colleague she blanched and revealed that this was your method with all the women you trick and use simultaneously, and has been forever. We matched the dates to all the other cases she knew of and I realised I and all the others had been tricked. How crushing to know that your satisfaction came from setting up the trick and then seeing how tormented I was, knowing instinctively that something was wrong, asking you and going back and forth a million times, while you gazed at me in gentle puzzlement, blinking in that soft way. How crushing to learn years later that this is what you were doing and are still doing, not just with me but with countless other women simultaneously, in addition to the groupies you use everywhere. Because of your sadism, C, I fear you. Because of your hypocrisy and impunity, I fear you. Because of your strength, I fear you. Because you target, use and attack women, I fear you. Because you are such a good actor, I fear you. Because you pretend to be a feminist when you are a man who abuses women, I fear you.
"How did he get away with it?" I asked my mother. "He's cleverer than you, in that regard," she said sadly, "there is such a thing as the perfect murder." And I recall, at the end, when I found out, you snarled, "You know nothing about me, my sex life, what I do." Yes, I realise that. And I realised, when you said, "I never told you I loved you. I was very careful about that. I said I adored you - but that's not love," that I had been set up. And I realised it too when you snarled, "It's none of your business what I do with my dick."
I am tormented by the unspeakable horror of what you did to me - its specificity and its malice - and to many other women, and what you continue to do. In the years of the aftermath I have confided in too many women who then blanched and told me that you had done the same to them or to a close friend of theirs. I have learned, with a sickness I cannot put into words, that you are not just a serial abuser but a simultaneous one: that there is a mass, a morass, a mess, of deception, usage and abuse.
I feel humiliated, yet I have done nothing wrong. You may make every single of one my own responses and entreaties public with my full permission, C, but they reveal nothing because I have done nothing to be ashamed of. I do not lie about anything, ever, and am exactly what I appear to be. I believe that I deserve to be treated well, as I treat others and indeed as I treated you. I do not co-betray other women or stand by while other women are betrayed, regardless of whether I know those women or not. I have never been abusive to anyone in any way for any reason. I have been joyfully celibate for most of my life and do not play sexual or teasing or flirting games, ever, in any way, with anyone. I don't go back and forth with anyone on text or email or by post. I do not write lies, in articles or in letters. I do not get involved in 'affairs' or gossip or secretive, sexualised, gendered, interpersonal human situations, with anyone, ever. And I don't cover for perpetrators, or practice diplomacy with them, or speak well of them as though their compulsive abuse of women is somehow separate from the rest of their activities, nor do I help their careers - although I helped yours, C (not knowing what you were), and you took this help and used it for yourself.
C, do you realise that where sexual attention is procured under false pretences, consent cannot be freely given? Know that I would rather be punched in the face once than chosen out of a crowd then methodically used and destroyed from the inside out with that unspeakably evil combination of alternating kindness and cruelty, teasing come-on and marginalisation, only to discover years later that this is actually your strategy with all women except those grovellers you use once and discard and the industry figures you court to utilise.
I know, C, that I was nothing to you, just another mark to be tricked and demolished alongside the others. And there is some humour in realising that I am not the star of a story but another faceless dupe, set up and used by a con artist. But I am something to myself: a kind, strong, clever and decent person who was light on her feet, open and affectionate. That person is dead. You offered many gifts, which I see now were carefully selected bribes and that I was one recipient among others, all equally manipulated. I have returned these of course. But the two greatest presents are ones I cannot return and do not want: they are sadness and fear, extreme fear of you and of a world in which perpetrators are assisted, courted and helped and victims are disbelieved. Now when I see your face I do not see beauty there, but the silent gloating of a corrupt, selfish abuser. Wherever I go, I am riven with fear of seeing you or seeing or hearing your name. Whenever I am invited somewhere I check the roster to make sure you will not be there. When I walk on the street I am afraid of bumping into you. When I am with colleagues I am braced in anticipation of someone mentioning you. When I see or hear your name I feel as though I have been stabbed in the heart. And drunk poison. "It's a rough world out there," said a wise friend to me, "you don't realise how lucky you were to have been able to float above it all your life." Oh, but I do realise. And from that height I have been dragged down by your dishonour. I am terrified by your duplicity, C, because you are so good at what you do.
Margaret Atwood writes in The Handmaid's Tale, "The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil." Evil is the right word, but the moment of realisation was not the worst. The worst was and is the neverending aftermath and the endless rolling-out of consequences, each one deeper and worse than the last. This used to be my world too, C, but I can not longer be part of any society in which you thrive. I have been defiled by you.
C, you do not live in Purgatory, but I do. I am caught between the memory of a sweet and happy past, which turned out to be a trick, and a disillusioned future in which anything anyone says to me is met with suspicion and uncharacteristic mistrust. It is a warped reality in which exactly those 'family men' who go on about being male feminists are the biggest saboteurs. And they can be assured that their actions will be condoned by apologists and women who speak out will be said to be (let me get my medieval misogyny dictionary out) mad, bad, petty, malicious liars who are overreacting or have made some kind of pathetic interpretive mistake. As if any woman, in a million years, would drag her own name through the muck to make up a lie as humiliating as this.
When I think about how I behaved with you, with such open-eyed delight and interest, when I think about what I wrote to you - "It's as though Rodin and Michelangelo fought to make you" - the things I said, the pet names, the gifts, the endearments which were wholly meant, the ridiculous party, the idiotic outfits, the column, the stupid poem, and how you acted, as if with with absolute reciprocity, I am corroded by coarse inner humiliation and regret. I made a fool of myself. I am much more vulnerable, reactive and small than I was. I have been implicated in something abhorrent and demeaning and the perpetrator has not just acted with impunity, but is celebrated for his ethical decency, his feministic stance, as well as his artistic gifts.
C, I want to congratulate you: you wanted to be successful, and you are. You are goal-orientated and indomitable in both your games and your career, and there has been no karma whatsoever. You are a genius not only in science fiction but in romantic fiction too and in all cover stories, untrue justifications and complex hoaxes. You have won every award but the greatest prize, I am sure, is that you have defeated the laws of karma. Bravo. How easily you mistreat. How tightly you people stick together. How little kickback there is. How assiduously you take. How smoothly you lie. What skills you have. I will be at your next prizegiving, clapping hardest of all, because I am in awe. You wanted to lie to, deceive, sexually exploit, professionally use, emotionally eviscerate, mislead, sabotage and betray women, and you did. You thought you would be assisted and protected by countless other men and their geishas, and your own self-hating groupies, and you were. You wanted to be an abusive man, and you are.
