There is an intractable kind of misogyny that resists all argument. It’s easy to point to National Review Online writer Kevin D. Williamson’s response to Lena Dunham’s “Not That Kind of Girl” as a prime example of it, but he’s just the easiest target. There is no reason to expect anything else from someone who willfully denies a woman’s very humanity. Though he offers little else, we can still look at Williamson to understand something about the insidious way that this kind of vitriol, in lower and sometimes undetectable doses, characterizes much of how we tend to talk about women, sex, consent, rape and blame.

In a chapter of her book called “Girls & Jerks,” Dunham recounts, in her trademark style of dark absurdism delivered with a smile, “an ill-fated evening of lovemaking” with a “mustachioed campus Republican” named Barry. It involves a condom flung into a tree, a clueless partner and, to wrap it all up, a righteous moment of feminist power when Dunham throws the man’s shoes and clothes out the door and tells him to hit the road. Because of the title’s chapter, we are meant to understand this guy as a jerk Dunham has known and fucked. We read, cringe a little, move on.

But in another chapter, this one called “Barry,” Dunham returns to the encounter with the mustachioed condom-flinger, writing, ““[I]n another essay in this book I describe a sexual encounter with a mustachioed campus Republican as the upsetting but educational choice of a girl who was new to sex when, in fact, it didn’t feel like a choice at all.” She then recounts the story again, sharing other details. How intoxicated she was, how aggressive Barry was, the medical attention she required after it all ended, the shame and confusion she felt as she remembered and contended with the experience. “I never gave permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us,” she writes. “I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking.”

It’s a painful chapter to read, to watch Dunham navigate her own competing narratives — of righteous anger, of laughing self-preservation, of self-blame — about an experience that felt dangerous and scary but also, somehow, like it was her fault. I know very few women who don’t have a story like this, women who, like Dunham, feel that what happened to them was violating and wrong while also believing that “there are fifty ways it’s my fault.” Dunham is also, like so many other women, not always exactly sure what to call what happened. She also, like so many other women, wants the reader to understand why that’s OK.

After expressing some outrage about Dunham’s wealth and privilege (who would have guessed that Williamson was such a socialist?), he targets her for writing about Barry, questions whether she is telling the truth, seems to suggest that Dunham should share her medical records as evidence of the incident and then calls the chapter a public lynching. It’s gross, and it’s predictable in its grossness. There is no empathy for Dunham to be found because, to Williamson, the story is all about Barry.

Because all of these stories are always about Barry.

In our current public conversations about affirmative consent and sexual assault, most of which are focused on California’s new legal standard for college campuses rather than the far more essential work of shifting our culture’s (and, more specifically, men’s) attitudes about sex from one of transaction and commodity to consent and mutual pleasure, we are centering the Barrys. We are pretending that most rape is an accident and fretting about the men who could be harmed by women sharing their stories, by women having more room to say, like Dunham, “[A]t no moment did I consent to being handled that way.”