‘Baby Reindeer’ banks on the new compassion for frail men

livemint.com:

Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is a young man who has claimed that when he was 17, a beautiful 37-year-old actress had “taken advantage of" him. “That’s the trauma?" jeers David, accusing him of being a fraud.

Donny, as though fearing the gaze of the ancient among us, explains why he feels so traumatized. Before Martha stormed into his life, a man had taken advantage of him. A successful TV writer who had befriended him and promised to take his career far, had plied him with drugs and assaulted him.

Donny says that the event decisively propelled him towards homosexuality. Psychoanalysis is a modern thing, though not as modern as compassion for men assailed by women. You would never encounter psychoanalysis in the great epics, or Shakespeare, or even in the classics of Dickens’ times.

But after Sigmund Freud promoted the idea that things can be hidden not only in chests and lockers but also inside your head, and that they can be found, there was a revolution in reading the mind, most of it as spurious as reading the palm. But another trait of modern compassion is that a man is granted the right to interpret his frailty and feelings, and his whole personality, as effects of powerful causes. In the modern world, no one questions anyone’s trauma.

So the person who finally does is from a more familiar world—Fiona Harvey, who says the character Martha is based on her. She appeared on Piers Morgan’s show and said that the writer Richard Gadd has made up the whole thing, and that he may not have been sexually assaulted at all, that it was probably “conceived in his mind." She denied that she ever stalked him to the extent he claimed; that she sent him only “a handful" of emails and very few messages. And that she never assaulted