It is worth asking why barren remains such a shocking rebuke. It is worth wondering why the phrase childless woman is considered, still, to have an aura of sadness, and why the phrase childless man barely exists at all.

Americans, over the past year, have gotten relatively good at discussing the emotional effects of sexual abuse; they remain, however, much less good at discussing its professional effects. But as the writer Rebecca Traister put it, “We must regularly remind everyone paying attention that sexual harassment is a crime not simply on the grounds that it is a sexual violation, but because it is a form of discrimination.”

Scarry’s tweet, on its own, isn’t worth much more discussion; it was a bad thought, posted in bad faith. What’s notable, though, is the way his tweet tangled with Ocasio-Cortez’s observation about the way she has been treated during her congressional orientation. Both tweets were asking questions about power and representation and belonging.

As Ford was grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee, one thing became clear: being believed would require her to convince her interrogators of something that has very little to do with the truth of her allegations. She would have to prove that she is, rather than angry or bitter, approachable, and helpful, and appropriately vulnerable.

The Moonves news, in that sense, is at once historic and, at the same time, no news at all. It is a story whose ending and whose moral arc are both thoroughly unclear and deeply contingent, dependent as they are on an investigation that is still being carried out—under the ultimate auspices of CBS itself.

Heels, in Europe in the 18th century, given their origins in the riding of horses and the cavalric waging of war, were for a long time traditionally worn by men, It wasn’t until the time of the French revolution that heels’ roles as gender markers and as status symbols collided. On the one hand, France’s post-revolution society emphasized practicality and reason, and heels, while they are many things, are decidedly impractical. By the time Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, the new ruler made a point of wearing flats.

People are simply taking the infrastructure that already exists—#MeToo, the movement and the hashtag—and appending additional ideas to it. They are, in that, asking too much of #MeToo. They are weighing it down with the inevitable freight of hope and expectation.

Here is the etymology the Oxford English Dictionary provides for the word genius, imported to English straight from the Latin: “male spirit of a family, existing in the head of the family and subsequently in the divine or spiritual part of each individual, personification of a person’s natural appetites, spirit or personality of an emperor regarded as an object of worship, spirit of a place, spirit of a corporation, (in literature) talent, inspiration, person endowed with talent, also demon or spiritual being in general.”

Wolff’s coy allegations against Haley (and ostensibly against Trump, as well—but the cost of such rumors, of course, is rarely distributed equally) are evocative of one of the stalest stereotypes there is: the strain of gossip that is used to advance the reputation of the spreader even as it attempts to reduce the reputation of the subject. The kind of rumor-mongering that has so often been weaponized, in particular, against women.

In the world that Hollywood and Washington help to shape—the actual world, the world that cannot be breezily dismissed as fake news—sex with a minor is illegal, pure and simple. The crime is classified, rightly, as a form of sexual violence: “statutory rape.”

Day by day, story by story, in public and private, women, through all this, have been taught that the emotions that make them most interestingly and authentically and incorrigibly human are precisely the ones that disqualify them from full ascendance in humanity’s various institutions. In politics. In business. In pop culture. “Calm down,” the world has said, rolling its eyes. “Don’t be so emotional.”

And heels, as symbols and as objects, are fraught. They are impractical—that is their menace as well as their appeal—and, because of that, they are typically associated not just with feminine beauty, but also with feminine hindrance: with frivolity, with danger, with the ability to bear pain.