In an excellent post at, of all places, The Nation, JoAnn Wypijewski includes a very insightful paragraph that is worthy of stand-alone consideration. She began with the telling of her #MeToo story.

We both were young, 20s, but I was older. We worked for the same outfit, but I was paid. We kissed while walking home from a party, and then at the back of a bus, and then in his stairwell. He had made the first move, but only I could say, in the midst of our distraction, “Of course this means I can’t hire you.” He was an intern, I a department chief.

The declaration astonished him—whether because he sensed I underestimated him, I cannot say. Ultimately, he so surpassed the qualifying test’s requirements that not hiring him would have been absurd. Years later, a catty friend would say ambition alone drove the boy’s kisses: “After all, he was gorgeous, and you…” I was his boss and lover, he my assistant and lover, each of us on the seesaw of power and weakness that those dual roles implied until, over time, the temperature changed.

As you can see, it’s not quite the #MeToo story a Jedi would tell you. But Wypijewski goes on to make an exceptionally important observation:

That is a true story, true to me, and the telling, I suppose, encourages you to believe it. But what do you know? Say I were a man and the intern a woman. Say I called her a girl and someone said her desire for a job figured in the encounter. Say you knew nothing of her side of the story, as you know nothing of his—as, actually, you know only the barest details of mine. Say, finally, that she knew the value of her kind of beauty in seduction and social competition—how could she not?—but also its curse. Does that imaginative exercise open what for me is a sweet, if complicated, memory to sinister interpretation? Is the intern now a victim? Am I a predator? And yet the information is unchanged, as revealing and partial as it was at first telling.

When people tell stories, they tell their “truth,” their version of the stories. It may be poetic license. It may be that memories play their own tricks. It may be nefarious lies. But it’s their story and so they tell it and we are expected to believe it, even though there is no one to question the wanton use of a loaded adjective to temper an unpleasant noun.*

As I’ve argued, facts are objective but truth is subjective. What we make of the stories is left to us, as believing is seeing and not believing is intolerable when the truth comes from someone who sells her story as a victim.

But JoAnn Wypijewski reminds us that we haven’t a clue whether the story is true, whether the characterizations are accurate, whether the teller is the victim or the predator. Or neither.

But what do you know?

We don’t. That’s a fact.

*I’m told that some schools no longer teach students parts of speech, such as nouns and adjectives, as they reinforce systems of oppression. However, they still teach them about pronouns.