The Devil and Mary Gaitskill

On Sex (and Hopelessness) in Fiction

Mary Gaitskill, 1988, Photograph, via Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Getty Images

Among the dozens of stories Mary Gaitskill has published since her 1988 debut Bad Behavior, only one — “Secretary,” a detached BDSM narrative from that collection — has been loosely adapted for the screen. On its face, this fact is not entirely surprising. Gaitskill is, above all else, a prose stylist, renowned more for short fiction than her whipsawing novels, her characters prone to white-collar monotony and lurid sexual encounters. But if these themes have scared off Hollywood producers, they haven’t posed such obstacles for her closest peers, excavators of middle-American intercourse like John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates. In Gaitskill’s case, the sex isn’t the problem so much as its temperature, the hopelessness that precedes and follows.

After all, what would these scenes look like? In Bad Behavior, solitary women are drawn to Manhattan like moths to a porchlight; having arrived, they are dehumanized by bosses and suitors alike. Static narratives spotlight bodies briefly in motion, grappling for release and recognition. Desires are fed and commodified until they’re no longer desirous, giving way to consequences and gaping emotional vacuums. Veronica, a 2005 finalist for the National Book Award, is not so ambiguous: the narrator is brutally assaulted, and the heroine dies of AIDS. In the best and worst scenarios, sex is a temporary reprieve, an inversion of power. No one is particularly good at it, or even seems to enjoy it much.

Fiction is operative when reality overwhelms. Irving has a way of neutralizing abuse in his novels, blurring consent and control into coming-of-age tales. Predators beget predators, but cycles are broken by force of will; neurotic victims grow up fine, even maintaining friendly detentes with their abusers. In Oates’s stories, violence is refracted into prismatic melodrama. Gaitskill is, for her part, a sexual doomer, resigned to cruelty and non-consent — man does not assault woman so much as men assault women. But give her this: Gaitskill harbors immense respect for predators, seeking comprehension where Irving and Oates aim to redeem and obscure. In a 2022 Substack post on Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, Gaitskill writes of the film’s gender violence:

I understood an attack like that as 1) impersonal 2) horribly congruent with what happens every day here on planet earth. Even incest and pedophilia: it would be too much to even try to explain here, but eventually, in some intuitive way, I came to imagine how people, alone in the coils of some indescribably perverted compulsion, can do those things.

Her Substack newsletter, now two years old, would seem a purgative exercise. At 70, Gaitskill has cast off the shroud of fiction to tell us what she really thinks. Time has grown too precious for allegory. With her signature chilly remove, she takes on incels, campus protests, and liberal consensus. (A number of posts have been syndicated on UnHerd, a right-wing opinion site with such hits as “Why do these epidemics always start in China?” and “Labour’s four-day week would backfire.”) Her posts are trenchant, ruminative attempts to unpack the social issues du jour. These are things you say when bad opinions are expressed in erudite fashion.

Subscribers have watched Gaitskill contend with the onward march of gender politics, revisiting her own stances on free-speech issues based on experiences in the classroom. She lays bare personal history and her attempts to surmount it. Her ripped-from-the-headlines corpus includes two concurrent books: This Is Pleasure, a polemical novella printed by The New Yorker in 2019, and The Devil’s Treasure, a peculiar collection of excerpts interspersed with Gaitskill’s own commentary. Cruelty is, as ever, the subject, and Gaitskill is in conversation with herself.

If Gaitskill embodies a hardboiled 20th century feminism, she’s aware younger readers regard her with suspicion. In “On Not Being a Victim,” a 1994 essay published in Harper’s, she recounts being assaulted as a lens into “the date-rape debate,” criticizing the individualism espoused by Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe. Paglia and Roiphe’s calls for accountability — that women could and should prevent their own assault — have since been dismissed as reactionary chiding, and Gaitskill rejects them as such. “It assumes that all college girls have had the same life experiences,” Gaitskill writes of Paglia’s proselytizing, “and have come to the same conclusions about them.”

Yet with 30 years’ distance, Gaitskill’s dissent is a matter of degree. “On Not Being a Victim” is an essay about will and determination, culpability and self-knowledge, sufficient to make a fourth-wave feminist break out in hives. Recalling the onset of her assault, she maintains, “In failing even to try to speak up for myself, I had, in a sense, raped myself.” The painful memory is nonetheless occasion to roll eyes at “rape-crisis feminists.” “I was a very P.C. feminist before the term existed,” she continues, “and, by the measure of my current understanding, my critical rigidity followed from my inability to be responsible for my own feelings.”

These words have, by her own admission, followed Gaitskill throughout her academic career. In a 2023 Substack post, “Writing About Rape,” she acknowledges that students have refused to enroll in her classes (Gaitskill most recently taught at Claremont McKenna, following stints at some dozen U.S. colleges) over her “stance on S.A.” “In the time of ‘believe all women’ what was merely unexpected has become actually offensive, at least to some people, so offensive that it doesn’t matter how eloquently I might speak,” she writes. Gaitskill remains at odds with “absolutists” across the feminist spectrum; she is vexed not so much that students disagree with her, as that they agree with some overriding orthodoxy.

If Gaitskill finds these students idealistic or unsympathetic, their stridency incompatible with free speech, she might at least concede a certain pragmatism. Their attitudes toward abuse are a response to its ubiquity, and the failure to bring trangressors to justice; they are opposing, rather than embracing, institutional mores. Through this frame, the choice to not be defined by violence might be a means of suppressing or excusing it, akin to the tactics of Irving and Oates’s fiction. Doctrinal quarrels aside, Gaitskill’s depictions of her own classrooms strike me as, frankly, horrifying. Another 2023 post, “The Despair of the Young,” opens with grousing about “academic fusspottery,” condemning the intellectual conformity of liberal arts schools as “dictatorial” and “confusing.” (Gaitskill, in turn, bemoans censorship of racial slurs and engages undergraduates in group discussions about their own suicide attempts.)

She goes on to describe a succession of young men who exhibited volatile behavior in her writing workshops, turning in stories devoted to gratuitous torture and murder, getting a rise out of their (overwhelmingly female) classmates. In one instance, Gaitskill approaches an administrator with concerns about a student, Luke, prone to psychosexual ideation and physical aggression. “She asked me if I thought the student was presenting a ‘safety issue’ for the class,” Gaitskill recalls. “I said I was not a hundred percent sure — because these days you can’t be! — but he probably wasn’t going to come to class with an assault rifle and start shooting. I believed that he was more likely a danger to himself.” The pivot exemplifies the deference paid to menacing forces across Gaitskill’s work: Luke’s violence, she maintains, makes him more victim than predator. He continues to share graphic stories, and his behavior grows increasingly erratic. If Luke is a victim, I shudder to think of the tuition-paying classmates who must endure him.

The tenacious if selective empathy, the apprehension of mistreatment, the probing of “the knot of us, where good and evil are sometimes unpredictably mixed” — this accounting drives virtually all of Gaitskill’s fiction. Her insistence amplifies the fact of malice while reducing it to an ambient presence. The knot-of-us is ineffable and societal, the air we breathe, original sin, Stephen King’s It. It is deterministic and fatalistic, dwarfing free will. It is the subtext of This Is Pleasure, a novella purporting to dramatize gender and professional relations circa #MeToo. The story concerns Quin, a publishing executive and apparent composite of those cited in “Shitty Media Men,” a crowdsourced spreadsheet of anonymous misconduct allegations leaked in 2017. Quin faces a number of accusations, but mostly he’s . . . shitty, toeing lines of power and propriety, playing by the rules until the rules suddenly change.

Shortly after meeting, Quin makes an aggressively physical pass at Margot, the novella’s second narrator; she tells him no, and they proceed with their evening and friendship. Margot does not allow Quin to exert his power, and Quin, for his part, relishes being put in place. It is a complicated friendship, deepened by the absence of sex, each acting as the other’s adviser and confidante. Otherwise, Quin’s compulsions go unchecked. He sends pornographic videos to junior associates. He attends a literary reading and implores the featured writer, before polite company, to bite his thumb. He follows his secretary into a dressing room, gropes her, and the woman continues to work for him. He is always testing the waters, seeing how much licentiousness will be borne. For Quin, the lack of a clear red light is a green light.

Quin is, we are assured, a man of taste and culture; Margot goes so far as to suppose eccentricity is the source of his brilliance. She is only faintly scandalized when she learns a new word, microaggression, for his behavior. Quin loves attention, which is part of his magnetism, and occupies rarefied spaces — galleries, museums, publishing houses — teeming with underpaid women. Some function as enablers: a cheeky internet writer in his circle carries a flyswatter “to swat men who irritated her.” “You’re not even a predator,” Quin’s long-suffering wife despairs once the press catches wind of allegations. “You’re a fool. A pinching, creeping fool.” Brought to light, he is preening, pathetic, even feminine. All anyone had to do was say no.

His downfall propels the book’s inquiry. Quin is fucked-up, but who isn’t? Privilege allows him indulgences and makes him susceptible to backlash. There are implications that Quin’s accusers are cashing in, enjoying the press, secure in professional roles he helped them land. His wife bemoans the loss of income and health insurance, punishment that will be visited, in turn, upon their innocent daughter. Although This Is Pleasure volleys between a male and female narrator, the device is disingenuous: we are treated to Quin’s defensive first-person account, and that of his best friend, a woman who, owing to her own resolve, has been spared his advances. (In a textbook Gaitskillian reveal, Margot confesses she was abused as a child by a man so consumed with guilt he later killed himself.) That’s not dialogue, it’s a position paper.

I can imagine men like Quin. I’ve spent the better part of a decade reading news reports about them, and I’m sure conversations like these took place in countless boardrooms and cocktail lounges. But I don’t know why Gaitskill would write this book except to play devil’s advocate, to paint in shades of gray and absolve a fictional shitty man. Quin is not a rapist, nor is he entitled to paw and harass women in the workplace. There is no right-to-offend in the office or the classroom, but in This Is Pleasure — as in her writing workshop — Gaitskill would have women upset and inconvenienced for a man’s benefit. The novella depicts a witch hunt, the risks of believing women, and compromises to all-important free speech. We can’t expect men to be better if women keep moving goalposts, it says, nor should the strong be punished for the sake of the weak.

This Is Pleasure fails the simplest utilitarian logic: How many women should suffer in silence, lest a single shitty man face consequences disproportionate to his misdeeds? Have handsy misogynists really lost their hold on a country presided, alternately, by Donald Trump and Joe Biden? That Quin stops just short of rape is hardly an alibi, and his accusers enjoy far less institutional power than he. This is not, as Quin asserts, a matter of “the conversation” moving “too quickly.” If anything, it doesn’t move quickly enough to protect his victims.

Revisiting “On Not Being a Victim” — published when Gaitskill was 39 — the conclusion of This Is Pleasure seems almost foregone. “I am not idealistic enough to hope that we will ever live in a world without rape and other forms of sexual cruelty,” she writes in the earlier essay. “I think men and women will always have to struggle to behave responsibly.” The latter clause effects a subtle conflation. Men will rape, women will behave irresponsibly, and in either case, misconduct can be ascribed to the knot-of-us. This Is Pleasure implies #MeToo, with its extrajudicial attempts at holding men to account, missed the forest for the trees. Why punish individual transgressors, if cruelty and misogyny are the fabric of everyday life?

“Yes, all rape is terrible,” Gaitskill writes in her 2023 post on Women Talking. “But murder is terrible too and no one, not even the legal system, sees all murders as the same — they are separated by degrees.” The flaw in this argument is that our legal system goes to much greater lengths to prosecute murders than rapes, let alone other forms of sexual harassment. If the legal system is impotent in matters of gender violence, and extrajudicial measures are beyond the pale, where does that leave us? Gaitskill is correct that criminal courts distinguish violent crimes by degree, but this is inconsistent with the knot-of-us premise, and most of her writing on the subject. In her most recent collection The Devil’s Treasure, she reconsiders “On Not Being a Victim,” responding to contemporary critics:

I did not feel traumatized by the rape and actually found it relatively easy to recover from. I said: The terror was acute, but after it was over, it actually affected me less than many other mundane instances of emotional brutality I’ve suffered or seen other people suffer. Frankly, I’ve been scarred more by experiences I had on the playground in elementary school. I realize that may sound bizarre, but for me the rape was a clearly defined act, perpetrated on me by a crazy asshole whom I didn’t know or trust; it had nothing to do with me or who I was, and so, when it was over, it was relatively easy to dismiss.

Decades later, when I did a radio interview, the hostess was (still!) outraged by this statement, which she seemed to understand as an expression of pathological callousness and possible deep disregard for the pain of other women. It did not occur to her to ask me what happened on the playground in elementary school.

But even if she had asked that question, I don’t know that the answer would’ve made sense to her. What happened on the playground of my youth happens every day and “nice” kids do it: they humiliate, reject, and physically torment other kids to the point that the other kids’ humanity becomes distorted and worthless in their only social milieu.

I find this piercing, empathetic passage nonetheless flattening and apologetic. Of course we do not punish schoolyard bullying to the extent we prosecute sexual assault. Adults, with their developed prefrontal cortexes, are supposed to know better. Both judicial and extrajudicial systems assume a hierarchy of cruelty, murder being worse than rape, rape worse than theft, theft worse than pushing your schoolmate off the swing. The knot-of-us thesis, expounded at length in The Devil’s Treasure, manages to abstract and consolidate an entire spectrum of cruelty with acts of kindness. “If gentleness can be brutish, cruelty can sometimes be so closely wound in with sensitivity and gentleness that it is hard to know which is what,” Gaitskill writes.

This prompts her to question the concept of morality at its most elemental level. Our sense of good and evil, right and wrong — she argues — are decided by flawed, fallible thinkers, people who cannot comprehend the entirety of human feeling, themselves capable of deep cruelty. Hatred, violence, abuse: all these might be reduced to arbitrary, circumstantial notions.

Something I wonder: Who decides which relationships are appropriate and which are not? Which deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and little? Is it a matter of numbers or physical mass or intelligence? If you are a little creature or a little person dying alone and in pain, you may not remember or know that you are little. If you are in enough pain you may not remember who or what you are; you may know only your suffering, which is immense. Who decides? What decides—common sense? Can common sense dictate such things? Common sense is an excellent guide to social structures, but does it ever have anything to do with who or what moves you?

Entranced as I am by this paragraph’s vulnerability, I don’t struggle to answer her questions. We, the composite of humanity, decide which relationships are appropriate and which are not. We intuit this together, and alone; we make these calculations every day. It is an imperfect mechanism, skewed and warped by heartless bastions of power, rarely if ever democratic — and it is all we have. Things are not always more complicated than they seem.

Ambiguity establishes the stakes of Gaitskill’s fiction, from the lonely johns of Bad Behavior to Veronica’s callous con-men and This Is Pleasure’s defanged villain. No matter how mean or unfeeling, selfish or sociopathic, misdeeds can be traced back to the knot-of-us. There is narrative friction here: women may pursue their own desires, while remaining defenseless against cosmic brutality. Women may attract partners and narrativize their own encounters — they need not be defined by vicious, targeted attacks any more than by playground roughhousing. They share men’s innate cruelty, but lack the strength to express it. It is an almost Victorian gender essentialism, incoherent with any strain of feminism I’ve yet encountered. If women suffer at the hands of men, men enact the will of nature, the universe. To say Gaitskill humanizes predators might suggest she doesn’t take them seriously. On the contrary: cruelty is not minimized so much as generalized.

This confers Gaitskill a rare authority. Her fiction perches on the edge of the abyss; once you look down, you realize it’s all around you. And while I cannot fault Gaitskill for hopelessness, cynicism does not behoove the novelist. This Is Pleasure fails as both a morality play and a novella, because for all of Quin’s handsiness, everyone’s hands are tied. Shittiness is not restricted to the men in power: Quin’s punishment outweighs his deeds, and he is, in the grand scheme, irresponsible. Gaitskill depicts male predators as a societal, biological problem rooted on an individual basis, suppressing our true selves, producing martyrs and scapegoats. Better, then, that we do nothing at all.

Deference tends to be a quiet action, but in these matters Gaitskill is an open advocate. Why remove violent males from the classroom setting? Why censor racial slurs? If we can’t change the human heart, we may as well tolerate it. While writing this essay I learned of Nikki Giovanni’s death, and was reminded that Giovanni taught Seung-Hui Cho in a poetry seminar at Virginia Tech. Giovanni found Cho’s presence and writing so oppressive she demanded he be expelled from her class, threatening to quit if the department didn’t comply. The department moved Cho into a private instruction setting; two years later, he murdered 32 people on campus.

Was that the knot-of-us? Perhaps I lack Gaitskill’s faith in the healing power of literature; I doubt Cho’s staying enrolled would have saved lives. By her own account, the shitty men in Gaitskill’s workshops — like those in her fiction — are afforded acquiescence that is not, practically cannot, be extended their peers. She decided early in life that victimhood did not suit her, and intuited her student would not bring a gun to class and open fire. She was correct on both counts, and I’m not sure there’s anything to be learned from either.

Toward the end of The Devil’s Treasure — a collage of novel excerpts, shelved fragments, and self-analysis — Gaitskill submits a confession so candid, it renders the book’s fiction limp by comparison:

The simple desire for something sweet is never…simple, how beauty and deliciousness and inspiring speeches, even those that are sincere, are so close to rot and worms; the bewilderment and hugeness of it. In the face of such bewilderment and hugeness, one might feel fear and reverence, or one might just say, Fuck it, I’m going to do what I can to get as much as I can. I have felt both of these things, at different times. Mostly, I have felt longing, ever since I can remember and before I had words for it: longing for unity, integration, compassion, especially compassion for ugliness and evil, for those so hurt that they become ugly and evil. For people to be what they were born to be; for the soul to come free of the terrible house, even just for a moment.

Reading Mary Gaitskill, I’ve come to suspect some souls are best locked in the house. Unfortunately for me, Gaitskill anticipates all criticism with a deftness bordering on prescience. Her first-person writing renders me unqualified to discredit her rationalization of real-life trauma. Supposing sexual assault is an act of discrete savagery, I’ve cast my lot with the prudes, the absolutists, the rape-crisis feminists derided in “On Not Being a Victim.” So be it; it costs me nothing. I can believe that right and wrong are not arbitrarily assigned categories, that cruelty can be a choice and therefore can be avoided. I can believe men might be dissuaded from barbaric violence, that those who choose it might even be punished for it. I have to believe it.

Pete Tosiello's criticism and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Pitchfork, The Paris Review, and Gawker. He is an organizer with The Freelance Solidarity Project and writes the Substack

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