This is a top-to-bottom misread of Gaitskill's oeuvre, which is defined chiefly by her humility and her curiosity. The easiest example of this is the student writing troubling stories:
"The pivot exemplifies the deference paid to menacing forces across Gaitskill’s work: Luke’s violence, she maintains, makes him more victim than predator."
But Luke wasn't violent. He wrote violent stories, which isn't the same thing. The whole piece rests on shallow thinking like this. Incidentally, the fact that you conflate these things proves Gaitskill's point - that we have darkness within us that is difficult to categorize and react to.
There are a lot of strange leaps like this throughout this essay, an odd 'there's nothing to see here' with regards to the moral character of humanity. Applied more broadly, this would neuter quite a bit of our best literature. You say you are "unqualified to discredit her rationalization of real-life trauma." Why do you want to? Why the insistence that victims be defined by their pain? This perspective - not MG's - is the truly bleak one.
Her fiction is not nearly as cynical and hopeless as this piece makes it out to be. Read 'Don't Cry.' In fact, read 'Bad Behavior' and 'Veronica' and every other title name-checked in here. Her world is pained, but that's not to say it's without beauty and redemption.
thanks for reading. i just went back and read "despair of the young" to check myself. luke paces around the classroom during active instruction; he approaches gaitskill about his self-harm. classmates object to his depiction of women. sorry, claremont-mckenna costs $100k/year, they have every right to protest.
i would never insist victims be defined by pain, but "on not being a victim" is, i feel, a reactionary and prescriptive piece of literature. you don't publish something like that unless you think people are acting hysterically, and could learn from your contrarian viewpoint.
I actually found On Not Being a Victim to be extraordinarily compassionate! It had a huge impact on me in terms of helping me understand some of my own behaviour when I was younger, which I had for a long time felt confused and embarrassed by - and yes that was because I was sometimes slightly hysterical haha. But the essay actually helped me to put that behaviour into a context which helped me to see it differently, in a positive way.
I find Gaitskill's writing to be overall simply less morally prescriptive than you argue here - to me, she captures the mess of reality very well. I don't often end a piece by her feeling she wants me to take a side. This is Pleasure for example I read differently to you - I wonder if it's the experience of being a woman and navigating the sometimes shitty hand you get dealt to your advantage (when you can) which helps me to recognise the grey in a scenario like the one she describes? Like for example I did see something quite true in the both/and of women who both object to and have managed to benefit from sexual harassment/the favour of a slightly lecherous man. It's a bind, and one a lot of women find themselves in to varying degrees. I didn't read judgement in her depiction of that at all.
hey, thanks for reading and responding. i do think Bad Behavior + Veronica are amazing on the merits -- the other stuff i find hit-or-miss, because it feels more polemical. to your point -- the mess-of-reality stuff really works in those early books, which go great lengths to establish flawed characters + suboptimal contexts, but increasingly she tends to abstract powerful + malicious actors as The Way Things Are. (have you read The Mare, by any chance? agh)
as for This Is Pleasure...i can't fathom living through the last decade, weinstein + trump + biden + cuomo + shitty media men, and saying, You know what's missing from this conversation? Nuance!! it just feels like a giant finger-wagging gotcha, i was and am pretty shocked by it
haha - I guess it's your mileage may vary. Hate to say but I found it refreshing!
I agree with the original comment above in that I think Gaitskill is always, almost above all, curious. And that's what I love most about her work.
I haven't read The Mare! I have mostly read her non fic essays, so I wonder if that's also relevant in terms of what I've taken from her work compared to you.
This is excellent--thorough and fair. Thank you for writing it.
I read "The Despair of the Young" post when it came out, and struck me deeply. It's the first thing I ever read that captured my experience of being a young woman in the late 90s and early 2000s. The feeling of being surrounded by gendered violence, and your only option is to smile knowingly in cynical appreciation, to tell yourself you are entertained, to show no weakness. In that era, we were asked to be complicit in our own gender's degradation, and since young people always choose the zeitgeist, that's what we did. But it was exhausting.
I've never liked Gaitskill, or much of anyone from that 80s-era celebrity writer school. There was something in the style that critics and readers praised that I found debilitated, wearying, maybe a bit phony, in the words of notable cultural critic and tiresome literary hero Holden Caulfield. I had wondered if Gaitskill had more, but I think not. This essay did a great job of ferreting out details to uphold my view.
Gaitskill is a national treasure, and it saddens me that you seem to have failed to understand her so completely. But I thank you for making me aware of her Substack, which I spent a couple of hours reading this afternoon with great appreciation and enjoyment. One of your misquotations of her is particularly instructive.
You write:
>>her “stance on S.A.”
She actually wrote:
>>[they] think my “stance” regarding “SA” (sexual assault) would make them feel “unsafe” in class.
She puts the word "stance" in quotes because it is ridiculously reductive it is to reduce her lifelong exploration of the subject as a serious writer to a "stance."
"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."
She was not advocating for punishment, just describing her personal reactions to her experiences.
"Gaitskill would have women upset and inconvenienced for a man’s benefit. . . .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?"
Your utilitarian logic is simple, as in overly simplistic. The destruction of due process and free speech doesn't just affect one man, or just men in general.
"But I don’t know why Gaitskill would write this book except to play devil’s advocate"
In the "The Okayness of the Young" she writes "most of the students I’ve encountered are able to think for themselves, to find balance between the legitimate moral concerns that engendered what I labeled 'the corrective apparatus' and the unthinking zealotry it too often enforces." The effort to thoughtfully and continually find balance is not "playing devil's advocate," except to unthinking zealots.
"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."
Right, you think all human problems come from "bastions of power." And not the fact that we are all imperfect humans with destructive impulses to manage as well as we can. To accept that rape and murder have always existed and always will is just realism and being an adult. It is not incompatible with doing the best we can to mitigate those things.
"And while I cannot fault Gaitskill for hopelessness, cynicism does not behoove the novelist."
Cynicism doesn't behoove the novelist to do what? I think that was not the word you were looking for.
"This Is Pleasure fails as both a morality play and a novella, because for all of Quin’s handsiness, everyone’s hands are tied."
You make no distinction between morality play and novella, because for you they are seemingly the one and same.
"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."
The essay you link to is a very thoughtful consideration of how to deal with those things, and what the negative unexpected consequences can be of every difficult choice that must sometimes be made.
"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."
You're right, it is still much safer in this climate for you to moralize and ostentatiously grandstand as One of the Good White Men Who Gets It. Thank goodness we still have writers like Gaitskill who are braver than that.
Fair enough, I accept that minor correction. In the 4/14/2023 post she separates them as I did. But it still is not clear from your passage that she is the one using the quotes to describe what her students say.
> 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.
It's a lot easier to prosecute murder because there's a dead body. Rape often becomes he-said, she-said in a system that demands guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
> 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.
You acknowledge the complexity: "imperfect, skewed, warped, rarely democratic" but then you turn around and say it's not complicated. You're trying to have it both ways. The fact that it's all we have doesn't mean we should pretend it's perfect. I think you do struggle to answer her questions, you just pretend otherwise.
I accept that consensus-building is a reasonable system for creating law. In terms of which relationships are appropriate, I have my ideas. I don't think pedophilia is appropriate (I'm really going out on a limb here). But these days, at least on the internet, an age disparity in a sexual relationship is often taken as synonymous with abuse. Consensus-building on the internet is too often mediated by algorithms that tend to push people toward absolutist, black-and-white thinking. So the process of consensus-building itself is easily corrupted.
> 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.
I believe in right and wrong but I also believe, as Gaitskill says that "men and women will always have to struggle to behave responsibly." I don't think you can ever get rid of wrong. Absolutists do not accept that, they really think that it's easy to just be good. That everyone can just be good, that any conflict is evidence of wrongdoing, that all conflict can be avoided. But the world is primarily composed of conflict. The more you avoid seeing conflict, the more you start to see it everywhere.
So it does cost you something. It costs you the ability to appreciate the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
> “the knot of us, where good and evil are sometimes unpredictably mixed”
"it's pretty easy to like, not assault people" is such an annoying bourgeois attitude. There has always been assault, there will always be assault. That's why we have a justice system, to deal with inevitable wrongdoing. But you're not satisfied with managing violence and conflict, you want to eliminate it entirely. You're wasting your time, it never works out.
yes that's what the essay's about. the justice system is wildly ineffectual in dealing with sexual violence, for reasons you've already articulated. that means we can establish extrajudicial protections, or do nothing at all. gaitskill has made clear her preference, and i'd say you have as well
The idea that assault should never happen, and that certain unspecified "extrajudicial protections" can prevent assault, only serves to discourage women from protecting themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to assault.
Your attitude reduces to "bad things should never happen." But bad things have their reasons for happening. I know it's easier to avert your gaze and pretend we live in a perfectible world, because it is terrifying to look at things headlong. But I think there's more dignity in seeing things as they are, not as we'd like them to be.
i don't know how to prevent assault; that's different from condoning it. i'm not concerned with witch hunts or cancel culture. if powerful, malevolent actors are more likely to face repercussions, that's a rough approximation of justice, to me
This is a top-to-bottom misread of Gaitskill's oeuvre, which is defined chiefly by her humility and her curiosity. The easiest example of this is the student writing troubling stories:
"The pivot exemplifies the deference paid to menacing forces across Gaitskill’s work: Luke’s violence, she maintains, makes him more victim than predator."
But Luke wasn't violent. He wrote violent stories, which isn't the same thing. The whole piece rests on shallow thinking like this. Incidentally, the fact that you conflate these things proves Gaitskill's point - that we have darkness within us that is difficult to categorize and react to.
There are a lot of strange leaps like this throughout this essay, an odd 'there's nothing to see here' with regards to the moral character of humanity. Applied more broadly, this would neuter quite a bit of our best literature. You say you are "unqualified to discredit her rationalization of real-life trauma." Why do you want to? Why the insistence that victims be defined by their pain? This perspective - not MG's - is the truly bleak one.
Her fiction is not nearly as cynical and hopeless as this piece makes it out to be. Read 'Don't Cry.' In fact, read 'Bad Behavior' and 'Veronica' and every other title name-checked in here. Her world is pained, but that's not to say it's without beauty and redemption.
thanks for reading. i just went back and read "despair of the young" to check myself. luke paces around the classroom during active instruction; he approaches gaitskill about his self-harm. classmates object to his depiction of women. sorry, claremont-mckenna costs $100k/year, they have every right to protest.
i would never insist victims be defined by pain, but "on not being a victim" is, i feel, a reactionary and prescriptive piece of literature. you don't publish something like that unless you think people are acting hysterically, and could learn from your contrarian viewpoint.
I actually found On Not Being a Victim to be extraordinarily compassionate! It had a huge impact on me in terms of helping me understand some of my own behaviour when I was younger, which I had for a long time felt confused and embarrassed by - and yes that was because I was sometimes slightly hysterical haha. But the essay actually helped me to put that behaviour into a context which helped me to see it differently, in a positive way.
I find Gaitskill's writing to be overall simply less morally prescriptive than you argue here - to me, she captures the mess of reality very well. I don't often end a piece by her feeling she wants me to take a side. This is Pleasure for example I read differently to you - I wonder if it's the experience of being a woman and navigating the sometimes shitty hand you get dealt to your advantage (when you can) which helps me to recognise the grey in a scenario like the one she describes? Like for example I did see something quite true in the both/and of women who both object to and have managed to benefit from sexual harassment/the favour of a slightly lecherous man. It's a bind, and one a lot of women find themselves in to varying degrees. I didn't read judgement in her depiction of that at all.
hey, thanks for reading and responding. i do think Bad Behavior + Veronica are amazing on the merits -- the other stuff i find hit-or-miss, because it feels more polemical. to your point -- the mess-of-reality stuff really works in those early books, which go great lengths to establish flawed characters + suboptimal contexts, but increasingly she tends to abstract powerful + malicious actors as The Way Things Are. (have you read The Mare, by any chance? agh)
as for This Is Pleasure...i can't fathom living through the last decade, weinstein + trump + biden + cuomo + shitty media men, and saying, You know what's missing from this conversation? Nuance!! it just feels like a giant finger-wagging gotcha, i was and am pretty shocked by it
haha - I guess it's your mileage may vary. Hate to say but I found it refreshing!
I agree with the original comment above in that I think Gaitskill is always, almost above all, curious. And that's what I love most about her work.
I haven't read The Mare! I have mostly read her non fic essays, so I wonder if that's also relevant in terms of what I've taken from her work compared to you.
Tess I was just gonna email you this piece lol
This is excellent--thorough and fair. Thank you for writing it.
I read "The Despair of the Young" post when it came out, and struck me deeply. It's the first thing I ever read that captured my experience of being a young woman in the late 90s and early 2000s. The feeling of being surrounded by gendered violence, and your only option is to smile knowingly in cynical appreciation, to tell yourself you are entertained, to show no weakness. In that era, we were asked to be complicit in our own gender's degradation, and since young people always choose the zeitgeist, that's what we did. But it was exhausting.
I've never liked Gaitskill, or much of anyone from that 80s-era celebrity writer school. There was something in the style that critics and readers praised that I found debilitated, wearying, maybe a bit phony, in the words of notable cultural critic and tiresome literary hero Holden Caulfield. I had wondered if Gaitskill had more, but I think not. This essay did a great job of ferreting out details to uphold my view.
Gaitskill is a national treasure, and it saddens me that you seem to have failed to understand her so completely. But I thank you for making me aware of her Substack, which I spent a couple of hours reading this afternoon with great appreciation and enjoyment. One of your misquotations of her is particularly instructive.
You write:
>>her “stance on S.A.”
She actually wrote:
>>[they] think my “stance” regarding “SA” (sexual assault) would make them feel “unsafe” in class.
She puts the word "stance" in quotes because it is ridiculously reductive it is to reduce her lifelong exploration of the subject as a serious writer to a "stance."
"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."
She was not advocating for punishment, just describing her personal reactions to her experiences.
"Gaitskill would have women upset and inconvenienced for a man’s benefit. . . .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?"
Your utilitarian logic is simple, as in overly simplistic. The destruction of due process and free speech doesn't just affect one man, or just men in general.
"But I don’t know why Gaitskill would write this book except to play devil’s advocate"
In the "The Okayness of the Young" she writes "most of the students I’ve encountered are able to think for themselves, to find balance between the legitimate moral concerns that engendered what I labeled 'the corrective apparatus' and the unthinking zealotry it too often enforces." The effort to thoughtfully and continually find balance is not "playing devil's advocate," except to unthinking zealots.
"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."
Right, you think all human problems come from "bastions of power." And not the fact that we are all imperfect humans with destructive impulses to manage as well as we can. To accept that rape and murder have always existed and always will is just realism and being an adult. It is not incompatible with doing the best we can to mitigate those things.
"And while I cannot fault Gaitskill for hopelessness, cynicism does not behoove the novelist."
Cynicism doesn't behoove the novelist to do what? I think that was not the word you were looking for.
"This Is Pleasure fails as both a morality play and a novella, because for all of Quin’s handsiness, everyone’s hands are tied."
You make no distinction between morality play and novella, because for you they are seemingly the one and same.
"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."
The essay you link to is a very thoughtful consideration of how to deal with those things, and what the negative unexpected consequences can be of every difficult choice that must sometimes be made.
"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."
You're right, it is still much safer in this climate for you to moralize and ostentatiously grandstand as One of the Good White Men Who Gets It. Thank goodness we still have writers like Gaitskill who are braver than that.
"stance on S.A." is a direct quote, see post dated 2/3/23
Fair enough, I accept that minor correction. In the 4/14/2023 post she separates them as I did. But it still is not clear from your passage that she is the one using the quotes to describe what her students say.
> 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.
It's a lot easier to prosecute murder because there's a dead body. Rape often becomes he-said, she-said in a system that demands guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
> 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.
You acknowledge the complexity: "imperfect, skewed, warped, rarely democratic" but then you turn around and say it's not complicated. You're trying to have it both ways. The fact that it's all we have doesn't mean we should pretend it's perfect. I think you do struggle to answer her questions, you just pretend otherwise.
I accept that consensus-building is a reasonable system for creating law. In terms of which relationships are appropriate, I have my ideas. I don't think pedophilia is appropriate (I'm really going out on a limb here). But these days, at least on the internet, an age disparity in a sexual relationship is often taken as synonymous with abuse. Consensus-building on the internet is too often mediated by algorithms that tend to push people toward absolutist, black-and-white thinking. So the process of consensus-building itself is easily corrupted.
> 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.
I believe in right and wrong but I also believe, as Gaitskill says that "men and women will always have to struggle to behave responsibly." I don't think you can ever get rid of wrong. Absolutists do not accept that, they really think that it's easy to just be good. That everyone can just be good, that any conflict is evidence of wrongdoing, that all conflict can be avoided. But the world is primarily composed of conflict. The more you avoid seeing conflict, the more you start to see it everywhere.
So it does cost you something. It costs you the ability to appreciate the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
> “the knot of us, where good and evil are sometimes unpredictably mixed”
Reminds me of a Chinese fella who once said:
Good rests on bad.
Bad hides within good.
Who knows where the turning point is?
i dont know how easy it is to be good, but i do think it's pretty easy to like, not assault people. out on a limb here
"it's pretty easy to like, not assault people" is such an annoying bourgeois attitude. There has always been assault, there will always be assault. That's why we have a justice system, to deal with inevitable wrongdoing. But you're not satisfied with managing violence and conflict, you want to eliminate it entirely. You're wasting your time, it never works out.
yes that's what the essay's about. the justice system is wildly ineffectual in dealing with sexual violence, for reasons you've already articulated. that means we can establish extrajudicial protections, or do nothing at all. gaitskill has made clear her preference, and i'd say you have as well
The idea that assault should never happen, and that certain unspecified "extrajudicial protections" can prevent assault, only serves to discourage women from protecting themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to assault.
Your attitude reduces to "bad things should never happen." But bad things have their reasons for happening. I know it's easier to avert your gaze and pretend we live in a perfectible world, because it is terrifying to look at things headlong. But I think there's more dignity in seeing things as they are, not as we'd like them to be.
i don't know how to prevent assault; that's different from condoning it. i'm not concerned with witch hunts or cancel culture. if powerful, malevolent actors are more likely to face repercussions, that's a rough approximation of justice, to me
Just know that when you get tired of being an absolutist bourgeois prude, there are other ways of thinking that don't involve condoning assault.
Very well-stated.