When We Look Away: On Christine Hume’s “Everything I Never Wanted to Know”
Christine Hume | Everything I Never Wanted to Know | The Ohio State University Press | March 2023 | 184 Pages
When I first read the title of Christine Hume’s feminist essay collection, Everything I Never Wanted to Know, I thought, well, why would I want to know it either? My copy arrived during a busy week of the semester. I had papers to grade and more simply, I didn’t want to think about the violence that lurks beneath my everyday actions. I carried the paperback around in my bag, but when I took my lunch break and sat down to read it, I was more comfortable scrolling through ads for tights that claimed to be made out of an indestructible fabric, giving little thought to the sweatshops in which I suspected they were made, or considering the way, I would later read, tights have been used to homogenize women’s legs.
In many ways, Hume’s book is about exactly this—the urge to look away from the brutalities and misogyny woven into daily American life. It’s also about what happens when we stop doing this: when we stop averting our eyes and look plainly at the sexual predation that permeates positions of power, the limitations of cultural frameworks for understanding assault, and the inadequacy of carceral responses to sexual violence.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, “Consider,” is composed of five essays that explore the limitations and contradictions that exist within responses to sexual offenders. The second section, “Yes, But” turns its attention to the women who have lived and continue to live under the male gaze. Throughout both sections of the book, Hume frequently uses language that invokes vision: a device that represents both her own attention and the way her experience is shaped by the gaze of others. In the very first line of the work, she asserts “I kept my eyes open.” In her third essay, each vignette is referred to as a “Glance.” In a later piece, she contemplates her own “strobing visibility” as she considered the eyelessness of a statue depiction of the Greek goddess Nike. In “All the Women I Know,” a collaborative essay with photographer Laura Larson, a series of portraits depict women facing away, alongside lyrical essays written entirely in denial (“No woman I know has an instinct for it, an aptitude for being seen and going invisible as if by her own will,” one reads).
But vision for Hume doesn’t always mean clarity. Vision is also seeing so much, too much even, that one becomes prone to living in fear—of predation, razor-blade spiked Halloween candy, or semi-human boogeymen who embody “pure, simple evil.” If the #MeToo movement pushed for awareness and visibility of sexual abuse, now there’s the question of to do with what we’ve seen. It’s not enough to be afraid of sexual predation if we aren’t thinking critically about what we do with our fear, how to complicate tropes around criminality, and how we place ourselves and our own culpability in the social framework that leads to violence. In her essays, Hume—a writer and professor in Ypsilanti, Michigan—writes with a discerning and complicating gaze, whether she’s writing about the varying penal outcomes different sex offenders may receive, the gender discrimination that manifests in everyday objects like nylons and Victorian-era dolls, or the way that abuse has shaped her family across generations.
Her writing ranges from lyrical to academic, and although her essays include elements of the personal, this book is not a memoir. The reader collects pieces of Hume’s life in bits and pieces. We learn at different points in the collection that she lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan; that she has a daughter; that she survived abuse; that she has a frozen joint in her shoulder—but her image never comes into focus. Her personal voice is a directed and palpable feature in each essay, and the book’s most affecting moments are those in which she uses it to ground her wider arguments about culture and society.
In some instances, the personal anecdotes lead the reader to understand the intensity with which Hume studies violence. “Why, people ask me, do I want to spend my time thinking about sexual predation,” she writes, “I might say ‘male entitlement’ or ‘twenty-five percent of the Supreme Court,’ or ‘the headlines every damn day,’ but I think, It’s the parasite.” Here, the parasite is a metaphor for the way that sexual abuse continues to shape a survivor’s behavior long after the assault has ended.
The personal voice lends Hume a sense of authority, but more often than not she includes her positionality to question it. She often assesses the ways in which her perspective is probably limited or skewed by her whiteness, and she is suspicious of her own motivations. In an essay about a Black woman who was murdered by the police following a domestic violence call, she writes, “I use her body, her face, to imagine my own suffering. I use this woman’s face because race is the extent we will go to invent others in our service, but she does not belong to me.”
In this moment, the reader is reminded that the act of looking can never be separated from the body that does the seeing, or from the web of power dynamics it exists within.
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In the book’s opening essay “Question Like a Face,” Hume traces her own shift between looking and not looking. For her first ten years in Ypsilanti—the geographic center of the book—she did not look at the Public Sex Offender Registry (PSOR) at all. She didn’t want to know. The legal system, after all, isn’t a comprehensive report of sexual abuse; it can only provide a catalog of who has been legally apprehended and surveilled. In Hume’s account, while the system disproportionately targets Black and brown men, it allows men with more socioeconomic power—such as her daughter’s first pediatrician—to escape relatively unscathed. As ubiquitous and urgent as male violence is, Hume resists the urge to respond with carceral solutions or look for a version of justice that depends on the permanent dehumanization of offenders.
This moment is evocative of Hume’s central project in this book: She depicts a society in which we’re both turning away from the problem and overemphasizing the simple and sometimes harmful solutions. When we look, it’s often for the wrong thing, in her eyes: for safety to come at the expense of punitive measures for the offenders. “We don’t so much overstate our fears as misdirect them,” she writes in “Our Favorite Costume.” “We fear the wrong things then make laws that theatricalize safety while actually amplifying our vulnerability.”
For Hume, the focus on and demolition of an individual sexual predator seems to miss the point. After she told a boyfriend that she thought she had lice, Hume tells us, he searched through her hair on a train ride. “There, I got it,” her boyfriend says, “holding one up between his fingers, satisfied that the problem had been solved.” Anyone who has ever had lice knows that catching an individual louse has nothing to do with anything—the species, as a conglomerate, is almost always referred to in the plural. Anyone who has had lice knows the entire scalp needs to be coated in Crisco until it’s an environment that’s no longer conducive to louse proliferation. And still, Hume’s book argues, this is how we treat sex offenders, as if they can be plucked out one by one, as if this is a problem of individuals. “When we out celebrity men, we use the words ‘fallen’ or ‘taken down,’ reinstating the hierarchies and power dynamics that created the conditions for their sexual predation in the first place,” she reminds us.
Although Hume is critical of the PSOR and the individualized, “weeding out ‘the bad men’” approach to sexual assault it can represent, eventually, she does decide to look at the registry. It’s not clear what spurred this change, but when she searches it, she finds herself horrified, and then ambivalent about the reaction she just had. She now knows where the registered sex offenders in her neighborhood live. The violence has now braided itself throughout her personal geography. “When walking with my daughter,” she writes, “she stops to marvel at a dead bird on the sidewalk of a rapist’s house.” What is Hume supposed to do with this information she now holds?
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“What is the thing in me that forgets?” she asks in the very first essay of the book, as if addressing the version of me who scrolled through videos of monkeys dressed like school children while this book sat unopened in my bag; the part of me that still struggles to look at the difficulties of the world honestly. “What allows me to keep walking past the house where a woman almost died; where she took it or fought back; where she cowered in the closet..?”
Looking can provide freedom; an opportunity. But when we rely on simplified understandings there’s a type of seeing we miss. Hume writes “if we assume our positions as violator and victim, if we cling to blindly inherited logics of gender, if we focus intently on that one case, we miss the big picture.” We lose “the chance to embrace looking as a vehicle to understanding, its precarity and terrors intact. We miss the chance to free ourselves from the tyranny of turning away and its overcompensating consequences, the scramble to legislate, to react in the name of ‘safety’.” A large part of my reluctance to engage with the topic, I realize, is my own discomfort with the uncertainty that comes with looking at the full picture; the desire for justice and respect when we live in a country that dehumanizes people to obtain it; the fear that I will get it wrong.
Hume’s book does not answer any questions, for the questions are not neat. But it works to envision what another option would look like; one that neither retreats from the reality of sexual violence nor reaches for punitive measures. It imagines what it might mean to not only look at the dynamics of gender, violence, and criminality, but to actually process what we’ve seen.