What I mean by that is: Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, is a book about low-grade, nonviolent misogyny - misogyny that is so common and pervasive that it’s easy to convince yourself it’s not worth noticing. is the only piece of art I have encountered that made me feel the truth of that overwhelming disdain in all its exhausting, depleting force. It seemed that every time I turned on the news this decade, there was a story that felt designed to emphasize just how disposable, how unimportant, how exploitable our culture believes women to be. Or maybe it was earlier that year, after Elliot Rodgers went on a shooting spree in Isla Vista to punish women for sexually rejecting him. Maybe it was in the fall of 2014, after GamerGate took off, and woman after woman started posting in public the death threats and the rape threats they were getting every day for, as far as anyone could tell, having opinions on the internet.
Maybe I first had it in 2016, right after Trump was elected president and I saw a man posting victoriously on Reddit’s most misogynistic forums about how this proved that incels had won, that women truly were inferior to men and everyone knew it, that he could keep a woman in a fucking cage if he wanted to and no one could do anything about it. “My god,” I thought, “I feel as though I’m in a constant state of having just read The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” That was when every week another much-admired man was accused of doing something monstrous to women, and my entire life started to be taken up by the process of learning the details of this monstrosity, reporting them back to the public, analyzing them, and then reciting them over and over again to my friends at cocktail parties, while everyone whispered, “Can you believe it? Can you believe he did that?”
It was in the fall of 2017 that I first had the thought.
0 kommentar(er)
