Sex won't save us (Secretary, Lions Gate)

When I told Mary Gaitskill to read Michel Houllebecqâs first novel, Whatever, she replied: âYou like that crap?â The next day she sent me a kind email recommending an energy healer. I didnât take her up on the offer; I remained confused and disappointed that sheâd been so unimpressed.
Before our call, sheâd emailed me explaining that she wanted to talk about incels, and I thought that Whatever was the best book about them ever written: the world is divided into ugly and hot people who compete in ruthless combat, with no relief in marriage and no reward but rot. Itâs obviously depressing â when I first read it, I immediately made my first (and for many years, last) therapist appointment. I was a 21-year-old living with my brother on Gainesville, Floridaâs Sorority Row. I had no romantic prospects.
A few years later, I was in graduate school further north, in a contrived relationship with a cheerful Connecticut lawyer. In a cold and sunny condo, on the smooth wooden flooring, I read Gaitskillâs Bad Behavior: it was one of the only books about ugly women Iâd ever read. There it was, again, but Midwestern and dumpy, not French and brainy: the sick sad world, where you might get laid but youâll never get better.
Reading Gaitskillâs fantastic latest book, the essay collection Oppositions, I began to see why sheâd reacted so badly to Houellebecq: he sounded simple, scientific, and therefore stupid. And Gaitskill doesnât brook stupidity. Her terror and her grace â alongside her disorientingly good looks â is her intelligence; an elegant and icy one that, in the end, is also merciful. Throughout these astonishing essays about literature, music and more, she seems to be circling the notion that curiosityâembracing the muddle âis the path to empathy for sick, sad creatures like us.
Most of the essays in Oppositions are reprised from her 2017 collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. That title comes from her essay â included in both volumes â about teaching Anton Chekhovâs Gooseberries, with its famous speech: âAt the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall â illness, poverty, loss â and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesnât hear or see others now.â
Gaitskill serves as the person with the little hammer, but she doesnât just remind us of unhappiness: beyond that, her job is to remind us how complicated living is, how little we know, how much we have left to do. Her job is to make us be adults.
That maturity â sometimes painful, often bleak â can prove unpopular, especially when it comes to sex. But here, Gaitskill is in a class of her own: braver, ballsierâjust smarter. Twelve pages into an essay defending Lolita as a book about love, about how lovers strive for heaven and dwell in hell, she starts talking about how she was molested at five â and says she felt empathy for the man; that she was even aroused. Wow!
Anyone rushing to dismiss Gaitskill as unempathetic or cold would be hard-pressed: she inserts herself into these questions with unflinching bravery, and she knows suffering herself. But her âstoryâ, like everyone elseâs, is up for debate, and she doesnât make herself a martyr or a hero. And her goal isnât to condemn â not to condemn Mailer or Nabokov or her assaulters or the pretentious boyfriend obsessed with The Talking Heads: her goal is to complicate. Her goal is to change her mind.
She brings the same remarkable mixture of clear thought and startling vulnerability to questions of sexual consent: her essay âThe Trouble With Following the Rulesâ is, for me, just about the best analysis of date rape ever written. It begins with Gaitskillâs description of her date rape as a sixteen-year-old girl dropping acid with strangers in Detroit, before questioning whether it was really rape. In a stunning turn, she says that when she was âraped for realâ by an attacker who threatened to kill her, she got over it pretty quickly. Then, she writes about when a casual friend and her get drunk and he became aggressive and seemed almost to force her into sex.
In a move reminiscent of Amy Hempelâs The Harvest, Gaitskill writes: âIn the original version of this essay I didnât mention that when I woke up the next day I couldnât stop thinking about him, and that when he called me I invited him over for dinner again. I didnât mention that we became lovers for the next two years.â That first draft made the story simpler, but the messy version is braver and more true.
In Gaitskillâs vision, sexual partners have awkward, often painful, negotiations to make, often in the dark, often in a rush, often in confusion. And any decent, kind sex wonât come from rigid rules; it will come from, as she writes, âthe kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibilityâ. That negotiation may take years. By the end of the essay, she takes responsibility for pretending to consent, tripping in that apartment decades earlier, with that man who was poor and black and âhigh on acid and misunderstanding, just as I wasâ.
Gaitskill isnât telling women to have lower standards for sex; in a sense, sheâs telling them to have higher standards. In a remarkable piece on reading the Bible (âA Lot of Exploding Heads: On Reading the Book of Revelationâ), she defines fornication not simply as sex outside of marriage, but as âsex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of oneâs self or oneâs partner, let alone any sense of real playfulnessâ. It is a âprimitive attemptâ to âgive ballast to the most desperate human confusionâ.
Lately, outlets including the New York Times have been chattering about the idiotically termed âsex negativityâ, supposedly in vogue among young women. However, after reading Gaitskillâs essays, it seems theyâre not opposed to sex, but rather to what Gaitskill calls fornication.
âThe Trouble With Following the Rulesâ is probably the best articulation of what, I think, women my age are so unhappy about: in the old sexual regime, the rule was for women to have as little sex as possible, and now the rule is to have as much sex as possible. But neither world really cares what women actually want or need, and in the new, supposedly liberated world, even if you arenât date raped, as she says: âsometimes I did find myself having sex with people I barely knew when I didnât really want to all that much.â Sex can be unpleasant or regrettable or confusing without being assault; with women under so much pressure and in so much pain, itâs hard to imagine otherwise.
As she writes, all people have a mixture of strong and delicate parts; part of them wants strange sex, while part of them flinches from it. Often, we want many things we canât articulate at all: thatâs what being human is. We all know that, and we all deny that as we tell students to fill out âconsent formsâ on their phones before sex.
Gaitskill is trying â alongside other books of this year, such as Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and The Right to Sex â to make sex complicated again. Often, itâs neither pure, joyous, free-willed pleasure, nor felony rape. As Gaitskill writes in her sympathetic but clear-eyed essay on Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat who later became an anti-porn activist, âI imagined that Lovelace simply lacked the confidence to describe what she did and felt in a nuanced way, and that the thing was very, very nuanced and contradictory. So she went with either âI liked itâ or âI was raped.ââ
So many experiences are in between; in another anecdote, a woman in her fifties described how she was furious when she thought about how in her twenties, a man in the East Village would grab her breasts. But back then, she was giggly and flirted and loved attention. âSo which is true, the giggly girl who just laughed when the guy grabbed her, or the angry woman in her fifties?â
Then she amps it up: apparently, some women orgasm when they are raped. What are we to do with this information? We live in a world of pain and compromise, and we need new language for âthe sometimes excruciating contradictions that many women experience in relation to sexâ. Without it, to quote her essay on the adaptation of Secretary (âVictims and Losersâ), âevery American has been âtelling his her âstoryâ and trying to get redress for the last 20 years. Whatever the suffering is, itâs not to be endured, for Godâs sake, not felt and never, ever accepted.â
Gaitskill accepts suffering. Perhaps thatâs why girls my age love her so much. Gaitskill can see that even when we behave badly, weâre not just bad people making bad choices; we often donât have good choices. Weâre not sluts or evil or victims. Weâre lost and lied to by everyone that was supposed to give us answers.
Too many of us, like the protagonist of Secretary, âyearn for contact in an autistic and ridiculous universe, and⌠wind up getting [our] butt spanked instead.â We know that sex wonât save us, that work wonât save us, we know that feminism wonât save us, and we donât think the old rules will either. Thereâs a sense of doom.
The last thing Gaitskill said to me, as I was leaving her home last week, was that she thought sheâd have been a very different person if she hadnât been raised in Michigan. Perhaps thatâs the Midwesterner in her â a sense that the world where safety and comfort were a promise, where if you made the right choices the right things happened, has already ended. We showed up late.
But there, too, sheâs different from Houellebecq. She might be dark, but she isnât mean. She sees that everybody is suffering, men and women, beautiful and ugly. We are all both villains and victims. Across these essays, sheâs attuned to the way art and experiences people dismiss as upsetting or triggering are simply attuned to the complexity of life â to the way that love is a living nightmare.
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