2023-08-28 12:07:00
Twice he ignored her no: once when he touched her against her will. And a second time when he publishes this incident against her explicit wish. What the victims of a “sexualized assault” and the “crossing of physical, not just verbal limits”, as the author Valentin Moritz calls his own actions, is usually denied, he, who describes himself as a “perpetrator”, receives for weeks in the Excess: positive attention and praise for his courage.
In an article for the anthology he and Donat Blum published, “Oh Boy: Mannlkeit*en heute”, Moritz brought up the supposedly unspeakable: he reported on how he himself became a perpetrator of a woman.
“It hurts a lot,” Moritz sighed in early July on the show’s camera “SWR Culture”. There is so much that is eating away at him, he also informs in his text, but he no longer wants to keep it a secret. His prose piece “A Happy Man”, which was published by Kanon Verlag together with 17 other articles about men in crisis, raises many questions, above all about the role of men in feminism. And more concretely, the possibilities and impossibilities of reflecting on one’s own perpetration.
Delivery stopped for the time being: The debate book “Oh Boy” (Kanon Verlag Berlin)
Source: Kanon Verlag Berlin
Via the initiative’s Instagram account “No show for perpetrators” a few days ago, the woman who, according to her own statements, experienced sexualised violence at the hands of Valentin Moritz in May 2022 spoke up. She informed Moritz in writing that she did not want him to use the attack, “no matter how anonymous it was”.
Her statement led to a wave of solidarity that can be dismissed as a storm in the teacup of Berlin’s literary scene. But she stands for something bigger. Autofictional self-observations, which operate under the genre of “critical masculinity”, are currently booming. With the Valentin Moritz scandal, it seems as if the trend genre has now reached a turning point. What is the source of the new uneasiness about male self-questioning?
When the anthology was published, the “Literarische Welt” newspaper rated Moritz’s text as decidedly “unsuccessful”. And even if the author and publisher flirt with the nimbus of authenticity on the one hand and at the same time with the “literary”, i.e. fictional level of the text, one does not have to investigatively delve down into the lowlands of the debate on personal rights and artistic freedom in order to see Moritz’s text as that read for what it is: a testament to the unpredictable twists and turns in social favor that even the most cautious frontline fighters of progress are not immune to.
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The Overwhelmed Gender
What exactly creates this disturbing feeling when someone discloses their wrongdoing? What is provocative about the pose of permanent sensitivity? Is it the fact that men are now occupying feminist issues as well? Feminism had constantly demanded that men help in the struggle for emancipation. Or is it due to the fact that the female perspective does not play a role in Moritz’s text? The task of doing justice to everyone with a single text seems presumptuous.
Writing against the “deeply internalized silence among men” was the goal of Moritz’s text, the editors declared. The writer Mithu Sanyal, who was the only woman to write the afterword in the anthology and therefore knew most of the texts before they were published, explains when asked that she was “very happy” that “there was a text that also deals with it , where people have become encroaching on themselves”.
An anthology on the subject of masculinities or gender in general that did not take this aspect into account would have been incomplete for her. Statistically, it is not possible that she knows so many people “who have experienced sexualized border crossings, but none who have exercised them”. Although it “went very wrong in the way that was attempted in the book”, Sanyal considers it “politically important” to talk about our crossing of borders instead of looking the other way. “If we want to change a rape culture, we also have to break the taboo of talking about it.”
Dangers of Confession
Epistemologically, an absolute exclusion of the perpetrator’s perspective from the discourse naturally leaves information gaps. Morally, he may be blocking the way to important and legally relevant confessions. But in Moritz’s case, it’s not the what that seems decisive, but the how.
There is no shortage of literary examples of outright villains, especially in the 20th century, and they are even memorialized in “Lolita”, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “American Psycho”. It gets trickier, however, when the author lets it be known that he actually believes he is one of the good guys – or at least that he will become one with his revelation and the reference to the role assigned to him.
Where Moritz’ text reflects so much, seems to have already thought through every back door and trap, he leaves one thing unmentioned: the much-criticized tradition in which he is setting himself with his advance. In 2018, the editor-in-chief of the New York Review of Books lost his job for publishing former TV host Jian Ghomeshi’s essay in which he downplayed his sexual assaults on several women.
The Icelandic memoir “I want to look you in the eye: A woman meets the man who raped her”, published in 2017 by Tom Stranger and Thordis Elva, who was raped by him, also met with opposition in addition to praise, despite the co-authorship of those affected Media.
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Because anyone who publicly reflects on their own perpetration is given a stage not in spite of, but because of, their crime. The fact that the resulting imitation effect not only runs the risk of mobilizing a wave of productive confessions, but also new crimes and unwanted contact with victims, must be weighed up just as much as the risk of exposing those affected to renewed horror through the media-enlarged retelling of the incident.
The woman, who recognizes herself in Moritz’ text, describes in her Instagram post how, in view of the book, which is available in every well-stocked bookstore and celebrated everywhere, she “lives through this evening again and again”, “on which a no was not a no for Valentin “.
The perpetrator has the power over the story. According to the woman, whose limits Moritz exceeded, he glossed over the incident: “In reality, not only did I not say yes, but I also tried to free myself – unsuccessfully.”
But even if one disregards the woman’s statements and regards the text as a work of art detached from reality, the suspicion arises that the self-centered self-flagellation style involuntarily reinforces what he is problematic, for example when it says: “I am part of the problem . part of the patriarchy. And thus part of the rape culture. Of course, it’s not my fault that I was born into the body of a healthy, white, straight, cis male from an educated middle-class background I don’t know.”
An impossibility?
Compulsively keeping all conceivable allegations at bay, Moritz reflects less on his actions and more on his sensitivities. The text ends in a trivializing, self-assuring manner with a gesture of cleansing: “But at least I’m learning to name my feelings – even if it’s just the feeling of being a Frisbee. Huiiiiiiiii.” In the best heroic tradition, the attack allows him to emerge stronger from the overcome crisis. So it’s that simple.
While the story purports to shatter conventions by being progressive-feminist, it secretly cements the norm of the man intoxicated by his complex emotional world. Behind the masquerade of contradictions, openness and hybridity lies not only a repeated disregard of the female position, but a continuation of male power with contemporary means.
On the other hand, Kim de l’Horizon, himself represented with a text in “Oh Boy”, showed what a successful coming out as a perpetrator could look like, albeit with a different act, last year in the “NZZ”, in which l’Horizon confessed to having beaten up an innocent classmate as a child: “That’s not an arrogant foreign diagnosis, because I share your frustration, John and Ueli: As I said, I wasn’t the girl in the real situation. I myself was in the group of boys who punished the girl that school afternoon in the early noughties. I beat the girl. I hated it.”
Instead of boosting the writer’s ego, the deed is allowed to stand for itself. Instead of turning the perpetrator into a victim perspective, as in Moritz, the victim is supplemented by a perpetrator perspective, which l’Horizon uses to illustrate the general psychological mechanisms of violence: how the act came about and not the tears he sheds afterwards, stands in the center.
radical measures
After the allegations against Moritz, Kanon Verlag sent two opinions out, the first stated defensively that Moritz donated all proceeds from the book, the second declared the publication of the text as a clear mistake, knowing about the veto of those affected. The delivery of the book will now be stopped and Moritz’s text will be removed from all digital formats and possible new editions.
Several organizers, including the Literaturhaus Rostock and the 23rd International Literature Festival Berlin, canceled discussions and readings on “Oh Boy”. Twelve of 16 authors signed a statement announcing that they no longer wished to participate “in the distribution of the present version of the book”. The person concerned no longer wants to comment.
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It remains to be seen whether such radical measures are really necessary. The ball, once set in motion, can jeopardize the reputation of a small publishing house founded only two years ago, as well as numerous authors, many of whom had little or nothing to do with the text in question. The late awakening entails an all the more vehement cancellation.
Does this mean the end of critical masculinity, as discussed in Kim Posster’s book “Betraying Masculinity!”? According to Posster, under the label of “critical masculinity” a “re-sovereignisation of insecure (cis) men” is being pursued and the status quo is thus being maintained under the guise of “’correct’ vocabulary”.
In view of the boom in self-purifying prose from Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre (“Still awake?”) to Christian Dittloff (“embossing”) hardly come as a surprise. As Valentin Moritz admits in his contribution, the text is an attempt to “make something halfway meaningful out of something shitty”. The only question is, useful for whom.
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