Boys will be boys, right? Worlds best excuse for rape culture. Yep – all men are assholes, right? Is that what you’re saying Hamlet? That men are all liars and jerks and worthy of neither trust nor love, right?

Or maybe just all people are liars and jerks and no one should ever be believed, which is an even more exhausting way to live than believing half the people are naturally awful if you let them be. I’m always fascinated by the people who are convinced that feminists hate men – when it seems to me that almost all of us simply believe that men are just as naturally good as anyone else and should be taken at their word and aren’t all arrant knaves.

And then there’s this:

I find myself painfully moved by the #YesAllWomen conversation that is emerging this week. I find I want to contribute to it somehow but don’t really have a tweetable story. I keep thinking about it, though –
And find I’m thinking of this scene in a new light today. Maybe it was seeing a short clip of the killer on the news, ranting in a way that seemed so familiar and which led him to a terrible destruction. Hamlet isn’t this extreme, I’m grateful to say, but the way this scene could tip over into a full on gender assassination, well, today, that is what I return to.
In reading through a handful of tweets, I started to consider my own small moments.

*
#YesAllWomen
Because, in my bed on the night after my first sweet exciting passionate kiss with my very first boyfriend, I was lying awake planning how to fend him off, not savoring what I had so enjoyed or fantasizing about what might evolve.
Because, I was nearly 30 before I had a real committed relationship with a man.
Because I kept so many men at arm’s length because I could not distinguish who would turn and who would not.
Because mostly only the real assholes knew how to sneak past my defenses.
Because I woke up in a trusted friend’s bed to find him fingering me in my sleep. And did I wake up to stop him? Or feign continued sleep and roll over? Or kick him? I don’t remember. Except I know I didn’t kick him or talk about it later. I just played that Dionne Farris  “Don’t ever touch me again” song over and over. And I’m still friends with that guy.
Because I was groped on the bus to the Vatican by more than one old man.
Because so many men tried to slide past the boundaries I’d set.
Because I didn’t know how to stop them.
Because somehow I felt like I wanted to keep those boundaries always.
Because it was confusing to be attracted to men but also understand that I should be afraid of them.
Because during an exercise at a personal growth seminar, I discovered that the only people I consistently distrusted were men I found attractive.
Because, when I had a car, I always checked the backseat for rapists and I wish I was kidding but that is what I did.
Because New York City seems so much safer to walk alone in than anywhere else because it seems like there’s always someone around. But one night, when I fled my apartment at 3 in the morning, I discovered that there was a point where there were no women on the train, that perhaps I had taken a big risk traveling in the middle of the night.
Because the first time I walked around feeling the most attractive I’d ever been, I suddenly also felt the most vulnerable I’d ever been.
Because boys were pulling down my shirt to look at my boobs before I even had boobs to look at.
Because when the repair guy asked me if someone would be around to let him in to fix something and I let him know I’d be there all week, the look in his eyes made me wish I’d said “My boyfriend and I will be here all week” or “We’ll be here” at the very least. Because I spent the rest of that vacation worrying I’d inadvertently given an invitation to a rapist.

What should any of us do?
It is the human problem, really. None of us is entirely clear about what we should get up to. And the ones for whom it is entirely clear are generally the ones to be feared. Religious zealots tend to feel like they know exactly what to do. Even those that predict the end of the world and watch the date come and go. Even in the depths of their wrongness they remain sure.
I heard, on a podcast, about this effect of when you give someone evidence that their very closely held belief is entirely wrong, it actually intensifies their belief.

I think I know what I’m here to do and vaguely how to proceed but find myself questioning it at every turn. What should I do?

Well, people surely have some advice. Samuel Johnson was asked about the important things in life and reportedly said that the first pleasure was “fucking and the second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink tho’ all could not fuck.” Religious scholars might disagree with Johnson’s take.

Everyone’s really making their own meaning, chipping away at the sculpture of their lives. Only at the end of it is it clear what they were making. And even then –

Well, in reading about English Renaissance history, I find myself struck by the difficulty of so many people’s lives in an era filled with such amazing writing.

While Hamlet wonders what such fellows as him should do, other fellows were dying in the stocks, women were sold into prostitution, the slave trade was going into high gear. And maybe none of these people stopped to wonder what they should do as they crawled – they just crawled. Sometimes to the theatre where they could watch someone else wonder.

These are all the offences that Claudius might be most nervous about. These particular offences could be perceived as a threat. To Claudius – not to Ophelia – because why should she be concerned about his ambition or pride?

The only person to whom Hamlet’s ambition could be a challenge is Claudius. He’s the only one standing in his way to the throne.

It feels like an indirect way to put Claudius on notice to say, “Hey watch out –I’m fueled by all this stuff and I could snap at any moment, Big Guy. And I haven’t had time yet or the space to really plan what I’m going to do – but your times a-coming Claudius.”

What did you do, Hamlet?
What could accuse yourself of?
What could be so bad that it would have been better not to have been born?
The only things we see, thus far in the play are – being kind of mean to your (ex)-girlfriend, a little jerky to your girlfriend’s dad and a little jerky to your friends. All of which are totally understandable under the circumstances.

When you answer this (implied) question in the next sentence – all these “sins” are sins of thought – of pride, revenge, ambition.
Big deal.
But of course, these words may not be for Ophelia.

And this is a standard weapon in the arsenal of breaking up: the I’m-not-good-enough-for-you Gun, the I’m-an-awful-person-I-don’t-deserve-nice-things Slingshot.

There probably aren’t any really big skeletons in Hamlet’s closet. We probably see him kill his first person in the play. Probably.

I’d like to meet the woman who’d want to be a breeder of sinners. I’ve known some women with the desire to have children, certainly. And if one wanted to reduce them to animals – you could call them breeders. But breeding does really seem to simply be that someone’s using you to reproduce. So. . .I doubt anyone would really want to be thought a BREEDER. As for a breeder of sinners. Well, that’s another matter. That would be someone who wanted to set up a little sin factory. That might be good fun.

There’s the lecher’s section, the gluttons section, the murderous ones – all little worlds within the factory raising up little pockets of sin.

The babies born to the adulterous word will take some time to grow into the their roles. How will they train for their future adulterous lives? Are they trained in creating trust and then betraying it? Do they practice obtaining love and denying it?

It’s so much more comforting to think of all the evils in people coming just from a handful of them raised up in the sin factory. It would be simpler and easier to know what sort of sin you were dealing with – to have each person likely to only betray you with one sin – to not
have to fear that some sin was burned deep in someone you loved.

As someone raised without a religion, a nunnery always seemed a terrifying place to me. A world full of rules and religion and no men at all? Not for me. But I’ve been watching the BBC show Call the Midwife which takes place in a convent-like house, full of nuns. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad. This convent is hardly sequestered from the world. Its women are intensely capable and deeply involved in their communities. They have extraordinary authority and command respect that no other women seem to manage. On the show, we see a wide variety of women – unlike the rest of TV on which we usually just see 1 or 2 conventionally attractive women engaged in romance. To see a whole world full of working women of all sorts is a revelation, really.
So I start to think going to a nunnery might not be so bad.

Also, there was a period in history in which convents could sometime double as brothels so the range of experience could be pretty wide.

You end up in a convent with porous boundaries and a vibrant population and suddenly being a nun doesn’t seem quite so bad.

This sort of behavior was a source of much confusion for me in my youth. While literature (especially Shakespeare) told me again and again that women were fickle and changeable, it felt like it was always men who changed their minds.
For weeks he’d have chased after me, thrown love lorn looks at me and if I turned around and faced him, he’d deny it, claim no love at all.
Love would last a couple of weeks before he’d disappear. Sometimes a couple of months if he wasn’t local. Here. Gone. Loves me. Doesn’t. Claims to never have in the first place.
It was VERY confusing.
I see now that part of this was because of the men I was choosing. I was attracted to heartbreakers, to handsome gypsies, to moody artists who were interested in something next to me, really, not me.
I missed entirely the steady attentive, kind ones. Didn’t even notice them. If they gave me signs I missed them or ignored them. Those were the kind of men who, even when they left me, would never deny they loved me in the first place.

The self as soup. Good old stock. Boil it up, add some onions, some vegetables maybe some meat from last night’s supper – that stock will make you some high quality meals. But if you keep that stock going, as if it were sourdough bread, extended and extended, new stock and old stock at once, I imagine there might be a moment where it gets a little risky. Maybe it turns into penicillin. Maybe it just gets funky. Maybe it gets to a point where you really should just throw it out. Water the azaleas with it, see what happened to them. But the point, here, I guess is that virtue won’t be the ingredient to transform the stock. You throw virtue into your beef stock, it will remain beef stock, no matter how much virtue you throw into it.

Not when I said I was alright

Or when I told you things were going great

Not when I smiled

Or when I said I didn’t mind

Nor when I said “It’ll all work out”

Nor when I nodded slightly in tacit acceptance.

Hey, Theatre –
What’s up? I know it seems like I hate you these days. Almost every time I’m with you, I get angry and frustrated. I’ve seen you go some places I don’t like, do some thing I don’t agree with make crazy decisions, treat those that love you badly, break lots of peoples’ hearts. And if I don’t love you now, well, it’s important to remember that I did love you once. I did. And I can’t break up with you, Theatre. I think about it all the time; you’ve made my life something of a joke.
But even when I hate you, I remember how I loved you. And then something clicks into place and I don’t just remember that I loved you once, I can feel it again, now. It’s not often. It takes a shockingly good performance or a thrilling rehearsal or something like it. But it is enough to keep me coming back to you. It’s somehow enough.