Before our call, she’d 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. It’s obviously depressing — 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, Florida’s 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 Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior: it was one of the only books about ugly women I’d ever read. There it was, again, but Midwestern and dumpy, not French and brainy: the sick sad world, where you might get laid but you’ll never get better.

Reading Gaitskill’s fantastic latest book, the essay collection Oppositions, I began to see why she’d reacted so badly to Houellebecq: he sounded simple, scientific, and therefore stupid. And Gaitskill doesn’t brook stupidity. Her terror and her grace — alongside her disorientingly good looks — 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 curiosity—embracing the muddle —is the path to empathy for sick, sad creatures like us.

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Most of the essays in Oppositions are reprised from her 2017 collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. That title comes from her essay — included in both volumes — about teaching Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, with its famous speech: “At 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 — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now.”

Gaitskill serves as the person with the little hammer, but she doesn’t 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 — sometimes painful, often bleak — can prove unpopular, especially when it comes to sex. But here, Gaitskill is in a class of her own: braver, ballsier—just 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 — 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 “story”, like everyone else’s, is up for debate, and she doesn’t make herself a martyr or a hero. And her goal isn’t to condemn — 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 “The Trouble With Following the Rules” is, for me, just about the best analysis of date rape ever written. It begins with Gaitskill’s 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 “raped for real” 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.

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In a move reminiscent of Amy Hempel’s The Harvest, Gaitskill writes: “In the original version of this essay I didn’t mention that when I woke up the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and that when he called me I invited him over for dinner again. I didn’t mention that we became lovers for the next two years.” That first draft made the story simpler, but the messy version is braver and more true.

In Gaitskill’s 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 won’t come from rigid rules; it will come from, as she writes, “the kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility”. 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 “high on acid and misunderstanding, just as I was”.

Gaitskill isn’t telling women to have lower standards for sex; in a sense, she’s telling them to have higher standards. In a remarkable piece on reading the Bible (“A Lot of Exploding Heads: On Reading the Book of Revelation”), she defines fornication not simply as sex outside of marriage, but as “sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one’s self or one’s partner, let alone any sense of real playfulness”. It is a “primitive attempt” to “give ballast to the most desperate human confusion”.

Lately, outlets including the New York Times have been chattering about the idiotically termed “sex negativity”, supposedly in vogue among young women. However, after reading Gaitskill’s essays, it seems they’re not opposed to sex, but rather to what Gaitskill calls fornication.

“The Trouble With Following the Rules” 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 aren’t date raped, as she says: “sometimes I did find myself having sex with people I barely knew when I didn’t really want to all that much.” Sex can be unpleasant or regrettable or confusing without being assault; with women under so much pressure and in so much pain, it’s hard to imagine otherwise.

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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 can’t articulate at all: that’s what being human is. We all know that, and we all deny that as we tell students to fill out “consent forms” on their phones before sex.

Gaitskill is trying — alongside other books of this year, such as Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and The Right to Sex — to make sex complicated again. Often, it’s 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, “I 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 ‘I liked it’ or ‘I was raped.’”

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. “So which is true, the giggly girl who just laughed when the guy grabbed her, or the angry woman in her fifties?”

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 “the sometimes excruciating contradictions that many women experience in relation to sex”. Without it, to quote her essay on the adaptation of Secretary (“Victims and Losers”), “every American has been “telling his her ‘story’ and trying to get redress for the last 20 years. Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted.”

Gaitskill accepts suffering. Perhaps that’s why girls my age love her so much. Gaitskill can see that even when we behave badly, we’re not just bad people making bad choices; we often don’t have good choices. We’re not sluts or evil or victims. We’re lost and lied to by everyone that was supposed to give us answers.

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Too many of us, like the protagonist of Secretary, “yearn for contact in an autistic and ridiculous universe, and… wind up getting [our] butt spanked instead.” We know that sex won’t save us, that work won’t save us, we know that feminism won’t save us, and we don’t think the old rules will either. There’s a sense of doom.

The last thing Gaitskill said to me, as I was leaving her home last week, was that she thought she’d have been a very different person if she hadn’t been raised in Michigan. Perhaps that’s the Midwesterner in her — 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, she’s different from Houellebecq. She might be dark, but she isn’t mean. She sees that everybody is suffering, men and women, beautiful and ugly. We are all both villains and victims. Across these essays, she’s attuned to the way art and experiences people dismiss as upsetting or triggering are simply attuned to the complexity of life — to the way that love is a living nightmare.

Many describe Franz Kafka’s disenchanted fables as tragic. And this is certainly true. But they are also farcical. To watch someone being relentlessly wrong can be grimly enjoyable — as long as you’re not the person in question.

The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle.

White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right.

Joanne Harris, a bestselling novelist, recently wrote a blog post entitled “White feminists, I’m looking at you”. Harris describes white feminists as “women who ‘don’t see’ race, and who think that counts as a virtue” and are “quite happy to see women abused, as long as those women are different from their own privileged circle of friends”.

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She argues that white women are too defensive when they get accused of racism: “I get it. It’s easier to focus on the words and what they mean, rather than the reason they were used in the first place. So stop thinking about the words, and think about what you did, instead. Consider whether you said or did something that was harmful.”

But whether something is harmful in the first place surely depends on the meaning of words and the content of what was said? Otherwise, what justification would there be for saying the thing was harmful?

Harris’s blog insists that her white female readers should be thoughtless. Instead of reflecting on the situation at hand, they should simply listen to their critics. In short, she wants them to acquiesce to any charge of racism levelled against them: “This isn’t about you”, she states. “No-one cares why you caused harm. All that matters is that you did.”

But is it true that no one cares why someone caused harm? If someone who is, in general, an intelligent and lovely person caused me harm, I would be especially curious to know why they did. And conversely, if I caused someone harm, I would want to know how. But then again, I’m not a white woman; passivity is not for me.

Apart from being an exercise in incoherent pontificating, and a text that instructs a group of women to fulfil archaic gender roles, Harris’s blog is also narcissistic. If no one should care why a white feminist caused harm to a group of people, why should anyone care what a white feminist like herself has to say about any of this?

In principle, Harris is encouraging greater tolerance. She says that white women are not perfect, and that she includes herself in this: “White feminists, I’m looking at you. White feminists, I’m looking at me.” But this ostentatious meekness presupposes that everyone apart from white feminists will be acting in good faith: if white feminists are not perfect, why should we assume everyone else is? In truth, no one is perfect.

But if you only insist on the imperfections of one group of people, that provides the perfect backdrop for the Kafka Trap. Whatever they do will always be judged by a harsher set of standards.

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In her blog, Harris is perhaps referring to Kate Clanchy, a writer and teacher who was recently denounced on Goodreads and Twitter for the way she described some of her students in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Three writers in particular — Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh — condemned the book for its use of racist language and the hurt this has caused people of colour. Clanchy described one student as having “chocolate-coloured skin” and another as possessing “almond-shaped eyes”. Clanchygate, as these things often do, descended into chaos. Those three critics of Clanchy unpardonably received racist abuse and trolling on Twitter.

Before this summer, I only knew Clanchy as a teacher on Twitter who shared viral poems of her students. When I first heard about the incident, I was gently bemused by it. The first real shock came when Picador, Clanchy’s publisher, announced she would be rewriting sections of the book. Something was not right here — the book was only published two years ago, not fifty or even twenty, and it would have been read by countless people at the publishing firm.

I don’t think the publishing industry is staffed by people who are indifferent to racial prejudice. So what could have gone wrong? The novelist Amanda Craig, a defender of Clanchy, suggested on Twitter that the book would have benefitted from sensitivity readers — people of colour who are paid by publishing companies to ensure any description of ethnic minority people is not offensive.

But the problem with sensitivity readers is that people of colour are not the same: what is offensive to one black or Asian person is perfectly fine to another. It assumes that there is a correct line on such matters, and only a select elite of people of colour can establish it. But I don’t want a clerisy of ethnic minority people to shape what I read; I want editors to do their job and ensure the book is as good as it could be.

An example of a person of colour who was not offended by the descriptions in Clanchy’s book is one of her former students: Shukria Rezaei. Writing in the Times, Rezaei pointed out that “in the book, she describes one of her pupils as having ‘almond-shaped eyes’. Critics labelled this description patronising, insulting, offensive, colonialist and racist. This upset me. I am that girl with the almond eyes. I did not find it offensive”.

She added that “almond eyes” is “a term that I have often used in my own poems. My almond-shaped eyes are at the core of my Hazara identity”. In other words: context matters. And in reading both the testimony of her former students and the book for myself, I came to the conclusion that the imputation of racism made by Clanchy’s online detractors was unjustified.

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Clanchy entered Rezaei — and many of her other students —into poetry competitions; Rezaei had just immigrated from Pakistan (but her family is originally from Afghanistan) and didn’t speak good English. Clanchy found Rezaei funding to stay in school for an extra year because her immigration status was unsettled. And Clanchy found Rezaei scholarships and helped with her university applications.

Rezaei is not the only young person of colour Clanchy has helped. In her Times article, she quotes Asima Qayyum, another former student of Clanchy’s, who says:

“Kate gave us platforms we never expected. She fought for us to be in rooms and places we had never been welcomed in before and made sure people heard what we had to say. I know first-hand how cruel and completely unacceptable racism is in any form, and from my experiences it’s not something I’ve ever associated with Kate. I just want people to know and hear from a student who has worked with Kate for almost ten years that my experience with her has impacted my life in so many positive ways it’s unimaginable.”

In a recently published open letter to The Bookseller, a group of Clanchy’s former students characterised by what they call “multicultural diversity”, describe their personal experiences of Clanchy as one of “unequivocal care and support, always, for us as poets and as people”. On the topic of whether Clanchy is exploiting them, they say: “Kate’s promotion of our poems does not take away our agency: we do not speak through Kate, and she does not presume to speak for us”.

If the claim of “listen to people of colour” is meaningful then it needs to include voices such as Clancy’s former students in any estimation of her. Yet all too often “listen to people of colour” means listen to a select group of people of colour, take their word for writ, and suspend your critical faculties: what else can help explain how a publishing company that hitherto passionately supported an Orwell-prize winning book can acquiesce after an online backlash?

Some may argue that Clanchy is guilty of a type of white saviourism: the privileged English teacher condescending to refugee students. This would be a cynical distortion of what is evidently a generous woman trying to do her best to encourage marginalised young people to thrive. Some of the descriptions of her students in the book did make me cringe a bit, but reading the entire book did not leave me with the impression of a racist. Quite the opposite. Clanchy is genuinely enthused by living in a multiracial England.

Yet the Kafka Trap enables an English teacher who has gone out of her way to help refugee students thrive to become paralysed by the accusation of racism. Any further response from her would be used as evidence against her.

Joanne Harris addressed her piece to white women, but the Kafka Trap has severe implications for anyone who believes there is an important distinction to be made between clumsy writing and racial prejudice. Between imperfect women (and remember, no person can be perfect) and people complicit with racism. And between those of us who believe in tolerance and those whose minds have been degraded by a politics that speaks the language of compassion but is in practice vindictive.

These two incidents were connected by neither geography, subject matter, or substance; the first was a tense but ultimately toothless conflict between two neurotic New Yorkers in which nobody got hurt, while the second captured not just a horrific tragedy but a gross abuse of police power. It didn’t matter: within hours, the two viral moments had fused in the public consciousness to create a monster, literally. She was a boogeyman spawned on social media, one we loathed and feared in equal measure.

And because we live in the age of movies spawned by memes, she’s coming soon to a cinema near you. A bedraggled and atrociously-hairstyled Taryn Manning will be playing a villainous white woman who antagonises the sweet and blameless black family who’s just moved in down the street. She’s the embodiment of all evil, the manager-calling bigot next door, the proud owner of a soap dispenser emblazoned with the confederate flag. Her name, of course — and the movie’s — is Karen.

You don’t have to see Karen (and based on the trailer, it looks like a pile of hot garbage) to know how it will end: the villainess will come to a brutally but suitably violent end, and we’ll all learn an important, even life-changing lesson about embracing diversity and equity — lest one end up disemboweled by a wine opener.

Manning herself believes that Karen will pack a powerful, even global punch: “I felt a social responsibility to take on this role,” she told Deadline. “Even if I had to play the villain to effect change around the globe, then I was more than willing to step into the role… It’s time for change, and for me to be a part of the bigger picture meant a lot to me.”

Alas, Hollywood has but one “Karen” to cast. But for white women who yearn to effect change by embracing their own inner villain, two new books offer a way forward. Nova Reid’s The Good Ally and Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism, both published this month, invite white women everywhere into a new, exciting role: that of the bad guy.

“I felt like I was being eaten alive by a pack of wolves,” Reid writes early on in her book. But the feeding frenzy she describes isn’t a brutal, racist attack; it’s how she felt after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, fielding calls and emails from people who wanted to hire her as a diversity consultant. The tragedy in Minneapolis triggered an international wave of reckoning, and being recognised as an expert in her field, people turned to Reid for help. And those wolves? White women. Entitled, hungry, snarling.

The white feminist antagonist, inflicting countless harms in her desperation to do good appears in both Reid and Zakaria’s books — but it’s in Against White Feminism that the critique is sharpened to a point. Not that readers should feel attacked, mind you — “White women must not feel that the critique of whiteness within feminism is some crude intimidation tactic meant to silence them altogether,” Zakaria writes, even as she insists on the importance of denouncing “those who cling to exclusionary histories, stories, and forms”. (So, you may be denounced, but don’t let it intimidate you.) Reid, meanwhile, assures her reader: “Any discomfort you feel is temporary and pales in comparison to what Black people and People of Colour often have to experience on a daily basis.”

In reading these books, Reid and Zakaria become an omniscient authority, one who has never met you but knows you better than you know yourself. Zakaria explains that people of colour understand white women fluently, as a matter of necessity: this is the natural outgrowth of “the need to survive in a white-run world”. In practice, this means that Zakaria spends much of the book ascribing intent and motive to the behaviours of various white women; needless to say, her interpretation is not flattering.

White women’s reactions — or in some cases, what Zakaria imagines those reactions might be — are presented in turn as expressions of fragility, of defensiveness, of grasping hunger for power. For instance, Zakaria was married young to an abusive husband, a terrible situation from which she ultimately fled. But when the opportunity comes to tell this story to a group of friends, she assumes that this is beyond the scope of any white woman’s experience. In fact, she doesn’t tell the story at all, lest the other women “demote me mentally below the women who do the real work of feminism”.

“I know that my companions’ world is split into women of colour who have ‘stories’ to tell, and white women who have power and an inherently feminist outlook,” she writes. Remarkably, she’s so certain of this she never actually tests her hypothesis; instead she tells a shortened version of her life story and then quietly resents her friends for the rest of the night, first for their imagined lack of empathy, and then for failing to notice when she pays more than her fair share of the bill. (Zakaria, unlike her “prettily dressed, slightly soused, fashionably woke” companions, had refrained from drinking — a decision for which she also imagines she’s being judged.)

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Zakaria is deeply suspicious of white women, perhaps reasonably so, but it’s hard to separate her historical analysis of white feminism from the grudges that animate the book’s more personal sections. Her anecdotes often include snide observations about other women’s physical appearances; Zakaria is antagonised by a “smug white professor” seen “duly sporting the scarves and baubles of the well-travelled,” or a “willowy blonde” with her hair in braids. And while she assures us that white women need not feel attacked, this may prove difficult even for the most open-minded reader; the words “white women” appear in Zakaria’s book 161 times (the book is 245 pages long.)

Sometimes, the entire case for this or that thing being fundamentally “white feminist” seems to rest on the presence of an individual white woman somewhere in the equation. One chapter, titled “White Feminists and Feminist Wars,” seeks to frame the War on Terror as a white feminist exercise primarily through the lens of Zero Dark Thirty, the movie about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and its female CIA agent, Maya, who was instrumental in the operation’s success.

Here, too, Zakaria’s personal experience ends up dominating the narrative. She dwells at length on the screening she attended of Zero Dark Thirty at a movie theater in Indiana, where the crowd “repeatedly cheered” at the sight of “a brown man being waterboarded”, then gave the movie a standing ovation while Zakaria wept despondently in her seat. (Sidenote: I know the notion of a bunch of red-state yokels cheering for torture scenes before leaping to its feet to applaud the end of Zero Dark Thirty — in fact a pretty meditative work that in no way glamorises or glosses over the horrors of the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden — may hew believably to certain ugly stereotypes about the American midwest, but if you’ve ever actually seen a movie in the US, this scene is so out of keeping with how audiences usually behave that it’s hard to believe it’s entirely factual.)

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Amid this myopic focus on a fictional CIA agent and a handful of real-life female soldiers, one could almost forget that the American war on terror was enacted, strategised and fought almost exclusively by men. And indeed, overlooking the role of men in lieu of vilifying white women is a recurrent theme in Against White Feminism. In one chapter, Zakaria blames “self-declared feminists” after an article she wrote for Dissent magazine is met with an Islamophobic response — even though the ugly backlash was apparently fuelled by a male editor.

In another, she recounts showing up to an event that was billed to her as a speaking engagement, but turned out, humiliatingly, to be a sort of global bazaar at which she was supposed to man a table of Pakistani handicrafts. Zakaria was urged to attend by two friends, both men, who evidently misinformed her about the nature of the event — but rather than blame them, her contempt falls squarely on the women in attendance. She rages at the organisers, at the white women drinking wine and buying crafts, and particularly at the “Black and brown women doing the bidding of my handler and others of her kind”.

Zakaria is at her strongest when she zooms out to a systemic distance, such as critiquing misguided efforts to support women overseas, where a lack of cultural literacy led to interventions that were more intrusive than useful. But even as Zakaria reasonably criticises various movements for “imposing the goals of white, Western feminists upon women who were neither white nor Western and did not necessarily share their concerns”, the bad actors at fault were massive organisations: the UN Global Alliance for Clean Stoves in one case, the Gates Foundation in another.

And in some cases, her anger at the “dictatorial feminism” practised by these would-be do-gooders is oddly reminiscent of the right-wing critiques that have lately proliferated surrounding the failed American operation in Afghanistan: both Zakaria and Tucker Carlson have similar things to say about the usefulness of neoliberalism in a nation ruled by tribal politics and religion, and its attempted imposition of Western gender roles on Afghan women. At any rate, it’s hard to see what the individual white women who make up her readership are meant to do with this information.

So, where does this leave Karen?

Out of commission, probably. If she reads Against White Feminism, she’ll be too busy wallowing neck-deep in self-flagellating guilt to get busy making a difference, or indeed even have the faintest idea how she’d begin to do so. If she takes the advice of The Good Ally, she’ll be journaling through her awokening with the evangelical zeal of the alcoholic trying to white-knuckle his way through the early days of sobriety (“The magnetic undercurrent of white supremacy is a force to be reckoned with and will tempt you to go back to your comfort zone when it gets too hard,” Reid warns.) Neither book offers concrete solutions; indeed, one gets the impression that asking for them would be just another expression of white feminist entitlement.

But that’s fine. Readers don’t buy these books because they want to be efficient activists. They buy them to marinate in the vision they sell — because while white feminism probably isn’t to blame for every last one of the world’s ills, there’s a particular breed of guilty white liberal woman quite eager to believe it is. Maybe it’s because, if you look at it just right, it suggests a victory of sorts: that feminism has moved beyond mere empowerment and into the realm of actual power, that some women have shed the mantle of victims to become formidable villains in their own right. After all, women can’t ever be truly equal to men until we’ve not only achieved power, but abused it, using it to crush those beneath us. Orwell once said that “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

These books take that picture to the next level: imagine the exhilarating power of having your own dainty foot inside the boot.