“My career, at the time, was in his hands,” Allison Benedikt wrote at Slate this week, about the beginning of her relationship with John Cook, her husband of 14 years. They were colleagues at a magazine when they first kissed, and he was her senior. That kiss took place “on the steps of the West 4th subway station,” Benedikt writes, and Cook did it “without first getting [her] consent.” The piece is an intervention into the conversation on office sexual harassment, with Benedikt fearing “the consequences of overcorrection” on this issue. She does not think that “the initial touch, the scooting closer in the booth, the drunken sloppy first kiss, the occasional bad call or failed pass” are necessarily harassment, and has the happy marriage to prove it. Her piece was titled “The Upside of Office Flirtation? I’m Living It.”



Benedikt’s essay was widely shared on social media, praised for its “nuanced” approach to the messy nature of human relationships. Only a day later, however, we were reminded that there is a stark line between office flirtation and abuse. On Wednesday Lorin Stein, who himself is married to a former employee, announced that he is resigning from the editorship of The Paris Review amid an investigation into his behavior towards women in his orbit. Stein’s predation has long been a whisper-network item in literary New York. In a letter of resignation to the board of The Paris Review, Stein apologized for the way he has “blurred the personal and the professional in ways that were ... disrespectful of my colleagues and our contributors.” He said that he has come to realize that his behavior was “hurtful, degrading, and infuriating.”

Benedikt has my sympathy. She is in the tricky position of figuring out how the long-past actions of a man she loves fit into the new political landscape. If she is absolutely sure that she is a feminist, and if she is absolutely sure that she is against the harming of vulnerable people, then she is left with difficult questions: If she was merrily compliant with behaviors that are not acceptable in the workplace today, does that make her complicit with the culture of harassment? How can she defend her husband—and by extension herself—while maintaining that they were right then as well as now?

Ultimately Benedikt suggests that a man should not be condemned for the things that her husband did. But Cook did do something wrong. You shouldn’t kiss a junior colleague without asking. You probably shouldn’t kiss anybody without asking, as a rule of thumb to remember when you’re drunk. Consent is such an easy premise, and Benedikt’s reluctance to acknowledge it seems generational. Fourteen years ago affirmative consent was not such a widespread idea, and perhaps the simple words “Can I kiss you?” didn’t come so easily to a man’s lips. But the world has changed, and affirmative consent is now the standard. All college kids know this. Just ask!

It is not unreasonable to demand that men in workplaces act as if the year were 2017 and not 2003. At the same time, nobody is retrospectively prosecuting a man for acting as if it were 2003 in 2003. Nobody is hauling John Cook into the sex-crimes dock or putting Benedikt on trial for crimes against feminism. Nobody is suggesting that she thinks Stein’s behavior is okay, or that that the beginning of a loving marriage is the same thing as sexual harassment. But in writing her essay, in attempting to draw some universal principles from her specific experiences, Benedikt makes bad arguments with real-world consequences—of the kind that have kept the long-swirling rumors from Stein’s door until now.