In the fall of 2016, I started feeling little starburst twinges in the ball of my right foot. A podiatrist told me that I had a fat nerve, a neuroma, and gave me a cortisone injection that made the pain go away. Because something had come back odd on my blood work, he sent me to a specialist, who sent me for more tests, found everything normal, and told me to check back in after a year.

That winter, I went to the dentist, who told me that my blood pressure was a little high. “I think it’s the news,” I told her, and we nodded and sighed. In the summer, a dermatologist noticed, too. “I just spent two weeks at the Bill Cosby trial,” I explained. In October, the Times and The New Yorker reported on allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and I wrote about sexual assault for the ninth time since June. Readers e-mailed me their own stories, flooding my in-box with accounts of rape, harassment, and shame. I replied to each person slowly, crushed by how little they expected, how little they wanted, how they always reiterated that it could’ve been worse. Over lunch, a friend told me that her first boss, decades ago, had coerced her into a sexual relationship, and that she was just starting to come to terms with this. We talked until I had to go to the gynecologist. I was late filing another sexual-assault story. The speculum was freezing, and my blood pressure was a hundred and forty over ninety-five.

When I went back to the specialist, just before Thanksgiving, I told him that I was feeling fine—my blood pressure had been high, but it was stress, and I was working on it. He asked me what I meant by stress.

“Oh,” I said, laughing awkwardly. “It’s a stressful time for everyone!”

He gave me a skeptical look.

“I’m a writer, and I’ve been writing about the news a lot, and it’s sort of intense,” I said.

“What do you write about?” he asked.

“Well,” I said. “Lately, the Weinstein stuff . . . which everyone’s talking about all the time, anyway, and so it’s a little stressful.”

The doctor wrapped the cuff around my arm. “Let me ask you a question,” he said, sharply, as the cuff started to tighten. I got a familiar, awful feeling—a dissociative and desperate shimmer. I knew from his tone exactly what he was about to do. He was going to say that of course he was in favor of real victims speaking up, but he was worried that this whole thing was going too far. He would ask me if I didn’t think it was dangerous to lump all these things together, and I would try to find the words to say that the fear of things being lumped together does more to lump them together than all the speaking up, and then he would continue asking questions as a way of telling me what he thought. I am no more a specialist in sexual assault than any other woman, but I’ve found myself writing about the subject more than maybe anything else over the course of my brief career—somehow, it keeps coming up—and I have had this conversation more times than I can count. At this point, knowing that someone is going to talk to me like I’m unreasonable hits me as a distinct physical sensation. It feels like someone throwing poisoned confetti at the back of my neck.

“Weinstein is a real scumbag,” my doctor said, his hand pressing into the crook of my forearm. “But how far does this go? Someone says something out of line at the office party—you’re telling me that’s sexual assault?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not telling you anything.”

“Lot of people calling a lot of things sexual assault, sexual harassment,” he said.

“I think it’s interesting,” I said, “given the extent of what we’re learning, how many people seem more concerned with overreach than anything else.”

“A hundred and fifty-one over a hundred and eleven,” he said.

“Great,” I said, wondering if I would live to see age fifty without my head exploding into chunks. “We don’t need to talk about this!”

He switched to my left arm. “I’d like to know what you think about this, being a journalist,” he said. “There are a lot of things going on in this world. And you’re putting sexual harassment in the newspapers every day while we’ve got the M.T.A. breaking down, we’ve got this lunatic in the White House.”

“Give me a second,” I said. The cuff slowly tightened. I closed my eyes and imagined blue dusk, an open ocean, a quiet unbroken communion between water and sky.

“A hundred and twenty over eighty,” he said.

“O.K.,” I said. “If you really want to know what I think, I think that abuses of power tend to overlap, and that Trump wouldn’t have been elected if people actually thought sexual assault was important.”

“He wouldn’t have been elected if the Democrats had run Biden!” my doctor said.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, grabbing my coat, trying to get out of the office before I broke my composure. I walked through Brooklyn Heights, bewildered at how easily—how naturally—he had made me feel at fault. On the train to a meeting, I wrote down the conversation so I’d remember it. I wondered how soon I could get a new doctor, and how soon I could stop allowing strangers to implicitly hold me accountable for anything any woman has ever said or might say. I did the first, and I’m trying to figure out the second. My blood pressure, for the record, is fine now.

Though every woman I know has been anticipating a backlash since about thirty seconds after the Weinstein story broke, more than two months ago, the media equivalent of my visit to the doctor didn’t begin in earnest until 2018.

A few days into the new year, Daphne Merkin published a Times Op-Ed with the headline “Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.” Within it, Merkin evinced the genuine frustration of many women who find that the conditions that they fought for in previous decades seem intolerable to a younger generation. “What happened to women’s agency?” she asks. “What exactly are men being accused of? What is the difference between harassment and assault and ‘inappropriate conduct’?” These are good and useful questions if you attempt to answer them, which she did not.

On January 9th, a rumor began circulating on Twitter, and was quickly confirmed: Harper’s was planning to run a story on the post-Weinstein moment by Katie Roiphe, the feminist writer who made her name arguing that date rape didn’t really exist. Fact-checkers had reached out to Moira Donegan, asking if she was the creator of the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet; though Donegan later identified herself in a nuanced essay for the Cut, the knowledge wasn’t yet public, and the revelation could have put her at risk of harassment, or worse. After writers pulled their forthcoming stories from Harper’s and readers called the magazine to protest, Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece for New York called “It’s Time to Resist the Excesses of #MeToo.” In it, he scoffed at the spreadsheet—one man, he noted, with inexplicable disdain, was accused of “secretly removing a condom during sex,” not of workplace misconduct—and urged his readers to “resist this McCarthyism, to admit complexity.” He noted, approvingly, that a group of French women had issued a letter that denounced #MeToo, arguing (where no argument was necessary) that a woman could possess workplace power and still enjoy being sexualized. “Imagine that: enjoying being the sexual object of a man!” Sullivan wrote.