Okay, so: I just got back from a conference where I participated in a panel about slut-shaming as a feminist issue. Chloe Angyal, who was on the panel with me, wrote a really good recap, which I recommend you read, because this response is already really long, and I sort of doubt that you want me to make it longer by going into a detailed description of why it’s not cool or good or OK to shame a woman and cast her as dirty or selfish or disgusting for having too much sex, or too many kinds of sex, or too much sex of which you don’t approve, or basically just being too sexy. I mention this because I am going through the chapter now, and I am finding a ton of slut-shaming. To the extent that it’s hard even to locate a specific line to illustrate it; it’s really woven in throughout the text. Here’s one bit that stood out:

“She fired off an e-mail where she confided that she’d hung out with another male friend later that night and even though he’d wanted to fuck she nobly declined. To her, this was a decision of massive, potentially life-changing importance. Where she previously empowered herself to fuck around indiscriminately, she now empowered herself to abstain from sex. At least for a couple of days. She seemed shocked and delighted that she’d somehow managed to spend several hours with two different vaguely fuckable guys in a single night without giving in to her animal instinct.”

The language here is openly mocking and degrading — look at this stupid whore and how much she wants to put out! Even when she’s not putting out, she’s so stupid about putting out! Because she puts out so much! — and it continues to be so throughout the text. The narrator’s desire to have sex with O, on the other hand, is never degraded in that way. There’s self-mockery, but only of the emotions. Not the desire to have sex. Which O apparently has, and is satisfying, in the way that feels right for her, and in the way that the narrator verbally told her he was okay with. In a situation in which we can verify that they are both consenting adults operating free of coercion. “Sadistic sexual sociopath,” another term that’s used to describe O (and this is BEFORE she breaks the rule about not talking about her sex life, which comes in very late in the game and after she’s been roundly abused verbally by the narrator for many choices other than that rule-breaking) seems less appropriate than “person who believed what someone told her, and acted accordingly.” It’s not precisely a sign of evil intent to say “this is what I want,” hear the words “I want this also,” and to proceed to do the thing you’ve both said you wanted. A truly bad person, it seems to me, would have lied.

And the thing is, the relationship starts out with O talking about her sex life. The fact that she talks so much about her sex life is mentioned as one of the things that attracts the narrator to her. She is open and clear about the fact that she is not into monogamy, and the narrator says back to her that he isn’t either.

Now: People make bad decisions. People get into relationships that they know aren’t the relationships they want. People even fuck up the all-important verbal negotiation, where someone explicitly asks if X, Y, or Z is okay, by saying “yes” when they mean “no,” because they’re afraid to lose the relationship. As the story in the above post makes semi-clear, I’ve done that, in big and small ways. People have done that with me, and I feel legitimately terrible about hurting them by going with what they said; I ask myself constantly if I could have somehow asked more, paid more attention, figured out that they were just telling me what I wanted to hear or what they wanted to believe they felt at the time. Me = flawed, I said it up front and I’ll say it again. Me = deeply flawed. And, to give you full credit, you repeatedly stress that the narrator’s choice to say “yes” to a non-monogamous relationship when he meant “no” was his choice, and a bad one. But somehow it’s O who is the sadist, the sociopath, the castrator (“castrated” is used), the emasculator (“emasculated” is also used), the one who turns him into a “eunuch,” the manipulator, the one who is “narcissistic,” and “self-righteous,” the one who willfully delivers hurt, the villain, the dirty mean slut.

We can maybe discuss the whole castration/emasculation issue in a second, because I think it’s telling that the narrator’s feelings about this are described as an issue of manhood or lack thereof. But first, a quick aside about how this is all framed as a moral issue.

As it happens, I don’t agree with you on the issue of monogamy. I know people — like myself — for whom monogamy is basically the only thing that provides satisfaction, and I know people who are in really comfortable, happy non-monogamous situations, and I know a ton of people who switch back and forth between the two — like, for example, hooking up or having casual sexual relationships with a bunch of people when they’re single, and getting into monogamous relationships when they meet someone they really like. I can be fine with all of those people’s behaviors, and I can also be fine with the fact that I like monogamy better than anything else when it comes to me. This would be irrelevant, except that an explicit defense of monogamy as the only kind of relationship that is okay forms a part of the rationale to demonize O:

“Monogamy is the worst system we’ve got except for everything else. Polyamory is like Marxism: Great in theory but impossible in practice. The problem with Marxism and polyamory is that they each deny mankind’s true nature. Remove jealousy, greed, and possessiveness from humanity and both systems would flourish. But you’d also excise much of what makes us human.”

Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether O is human, because she seems to be doing polyamory (I don’t like that term, because of the hippie connotations you so aptly describe, but let’s roll with it) just fine, and not to be feeling any of that possessiveness or jealousy. You go at this again, in more overtly slut-shaming fashion, later: “[It] doesn’t mean you don’t love your partner, just ’cause, you know, you’re sucking some stranger’s cock.” There are some people for whom this is actually true. I’m not necessarily one of them. I think this might even be pretty rare. But this exists in the world. The defense of monogamy as the only system that works — when, in actuality, it may be the only system that works for the narrator — allows him to cast O as not just maddeningly sexual, and having a sexuality that exists outside of his control and which makes him angry, but as stupid, naive, immoral, a “zealot,” misguided, wrong.

And then it all falls apart, when she tells him (after one failed attempt to sever the sexual relationship) that she doesn’t want to have sex with men any more, goes away, has sex with a bunch of other people, comes back, characterizes their relationship as “not physically intimate,” and calls it a “friendship.” And here’s where the castrated/emasculated/eunuch thing comes into play. It’s clear that O fucked shit up here, too — saying that she wanted to stop having sex with the narrator, then having sex with him, for example, which is a stupid mistake — but the language in which the narrator describes his feelings is this:

“I told O about how painful it was for her to constantly thrust her sexuality in my face, only to coquettishly demur, ‘But it’s not for you.’”

I mean: That is really the issue, isn’t it? The fact that it’s not “for him?” Her sexuality is fine, as long as he is in control of it. If she is in control of it, and persists in doing things with it that he may not like (even if he’s verbally consented to it) then she gets all of those nasty adjectives we’ve listed above.

4. CONCLUSION

I’m in a really awkward situation here. Because I do like your writing so much, and I don’t think that you’re a bad or willfully sexist person. Me = flawed, everybody = flawed, flawed people can be really lovely and I bet you totally are. And I don’t identify you 100% with the narrator in the book — I think you’re probably consciously portraying this guy as someone who is not to be emulated, a lot of the time, maybe even someone to openly disapprove of. But you’re sort of calling my truthfulness into account here. So I don’t know if I’m being asked to give my account of the book a reasoned defense — and, I mean, I hope that if nothing else this proves that I read the book and can cite specific textual reasons for my reaction to it — or what. And I empathize, to some degree, with your reaction. But I wish you’d said that I was too mean, or too ad hominem, both criticisms which would be totally valid, rather than implying that I was willfully trying to misrepresent your work. Part of me, even the largest part of me, wants to just say what I think you want to hear, because I know I can be mean and ad hominem, and I really bet reading this must have sucked for you. Thinking about how to move through the world and say what I have to say and stand on my convictions without just gratuitously hurting people is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, actually, precisely because it’s something that I’m not always good at. But this is also sort of an integrity issue; if you come into my blog and leave a public comment that is critical, and I immediately back down because I want you to perceive me as “nice” and be able to co-exist with me in the world, that means that I can’t stand behind my own work. And I have to stand behind my work, for precisely the same reason I have to defend myself from charges of misrepresentation, because insofar as my readers or anyone I might work with is concerned, I am only as good as my ability to mean what I say and to say what I believe to be the truth. So, again: I really apologize for any hurt I might cause you, and it isn’t personal, and I hope you can see why these three selected passages — which did, yes, stand out to me, and which I wrote about for that reason — inspired the response they did. And I hope things can continue in a more or less OK way. You’re super funny, and you have a great eye and ear, and you write about pop culture wonderfully, and there are just really a ton of things I like and respect about your work. I studied your work for style when I was trying to learn to write. That is how much I respect it. And I know we disagree and it’s probably bound to be personal, but I really do hope we can at least respect each other, even though I would probably hate me like Satan for writing any or all of the above. I’ll continue to respect you as a writer, and your accomplishment, no matter what.

So, I mean, first of all, we have to talk about the fact that you wrote a fairly long memoir, and I mentioned it in a post that was about (a) a movie, (b) my dating experiences, and (c) your memoir. Not necessarily in that order. All of those things were used to draw certain connections and point to what I think is a trend in human behavior, and how people — men and women — are expected to act differently, or do act differently, around what is a really really common dating situation. I used more than one source to draw connections and illustrate a pattern. You may not feel it’s fair or right for me to mention that book without writing about the entire book, or to only mention it in the context of some other things, and I could definitely empathize with that, even if I don’t agree with it. It sucks to write a long thing, and then to have somebody write a short thing about your long thing, and for that short thing to be unfavorable. Okay. But I mentioned the parts of your book that were relevant to the piece I was writing. I do not believe that I was misrepresenting your work; I was representing, accurately, my own reactions to certain parts of it. Those might not be the reactions you’d want, but they were there. And, I mean, “selectivity:” If I tried to write a really and truly and fully complete critique of every page in your book, it would probably be way longer than the book. Every “reviewer” (and I put quote marks around it, because I’m one of those only in the loosest sense of the word) has to choose what parts of a work he or she will discuss, and which ones she won’t.

Second: I think it’s not only fair but necessary to distance you from the character in the memoir. Even writing, in a completely casual way, about my own personal experiences — as I did right here, and which I was actually criticized for by another person (not the dude in question, BTW; I don’t know that he even read it) who was around the scene at the time, and experienced some of the events, and saw them differently — has made me at least marginally aware that any given human experience is pretty complex and full of details and you have to choose which ones to include and which ones not to, and the experience invariably ends up being written down in a way that renders it incomplete and gives only one really specific take on the situation. It’s that whole Lucille Clifton poem: “they want me to remember their memories, and i keep on remembering mine.” And that whole process creates a character who’s not precisely YOU, but close to being you. So, like, let’s talk about the character of Nathan Rabin in this book. And make it clear that we’ve never interacted beyond these comments, and I don’t know you, like, at all. Because, this dude? This character, Nathan Rabin? I really don’t like his attitudes toward women.

Now: I’m guessing, from stuff you’ve said in other essays and whatnot, that you’re a dude who is not precisely hostile to feminism. You’ve mentioned it, and you’ve made feminist criticisms of things that I agreed with, in fact. So let’s talk about three things — abortion, sex work, and expectations of how women should express themselves sexually — that are undeniably key feminist issues, all of which you address in your book.

1. Abortion.

I think, given that people have literally been killed over it, and given its incredibly long history of challenge and struggle, it’s pretty obvious that abortion is inevitably a political issue. Even if you aren’t trying to write a “political” take on it. What’s often overlooked, in the politicization of abortion, is the actual woman who needs one, and her choice. And what’s overlooked, specifically in your account of this abortion, is the woman who got one, and her choice. The emphasis in the below-quoted passage is mine.

“I was suddenly faced with an agonizing decision: abortion, giving the baby up for adoption, or raising a child I couldn’t afford. My convictions changed on an hourly basis. I made up my mind over and over again to do the honorable thing. I’d marry Judy, drop out of school, and get a second job. Then I’d come to my senses and realize just how impossible that’d be. I doubted Judy could abstain from drugs or alcohol for nine months… I wrestled with the most agonizing decision of my life, two antithetical futures stretched out before me. In one, I was a harried father with big black rings under my eyes, two jobs, and a wife and child I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t support. In the other, I was freed from the responsibility and obligation of parenthood, but burdened eternally with the guilt of having snuffed out something I had created through naivete and stupidity. They were two different visions of hell. I couldn’t envision a happy ending to my dilemma.”

Here’s the thing, though: You, or the character Nathan Rabin, refer to this repeatedly as “my decision,” “my dilemma.” The character refers to his future, his agony, his feelings. His choice, which affects him. And this character isn’t the one who is pregnant. Nowhere in this passage is the choice to abort or not referred to as Judy’s choice, Judy’s dilemma, Judy’s pregnancy, which affects Judy’s future, not to mention Judy’s actual, physical body. It’s a passage about abortion written as if the man has the sole choice to decide whether or not his girlfriend will abort. We’re never given a conversation with Judy in which she asserts a preference for one or the other. In life, outside of the pages of this memoir, did she tell you that you had to be the one to decide, and that your decision would be solely responsible for the outcome? I find that pretty unlikely, but maybe it happened. We don’t know, because Judy, Judy’s thoughts, Judy’s feelings, Judy’s position on abortion, and Judy’s choice to have one — seriously, it skips from a description of the character’s feelings to the phrase “after the abortion” — are entirely eliminated. Judy is really only mentioned, in this passage, to give a bad word about her stability or credibility (“I doubted Judy could abstain from drugs or alcohol,” on the same page in which the character talks about smoking pot to deal with his emotions) and to relegate her to a faceless “wife” that the character “hasn’t chosen.” I mean: You used the verb “choice.” Were you unaware of the other, extremely common uses of that verb, in the context of abortion? On purely feminist grounds, writing about abortion in this way is extremely objectionable. Because it takes agency and focus away from a woman, and places her life and pregnancy in a context where a man and his decision are the most important part of the equation. And then, when Judy is given an inner life, however briefly, it’s this:

After the abortion, Judy sank into a debilitating depression.

“She’s a brick and I’m drowning slowly.”

That’s a quote from a Ben Folds song, and a quote that I find really objectionable in context, for much the same reasons that I find the above passage objectionable. We’re given to know that something is going on with Judy — something probably related to the abortion, and the choice of hers we didn’t ever get to hear about, something severe and worrisome and, in your words, “debilitating” — but it’s one line, after two fairly long paragraphs about the character’s feelings. And then we switch right back to his perspective, his feelings, via Ben Folds. Judy is the brick, the inanimate object, the thing that’s dragging him down. He, despite her “debilitating depression,” is the one to worry about, the one who’s really drowning. You go back to her, and spend two shorter paragraphs dealing with her inner life (she’s given half of the next short paragraph, and then the paragraph after that uses the verb “we”) but that moment — Judy has a debilitating depression, here’s how I feel about it, she’s dragging me down — sticks out. The chapter is dedicated to that song, implying that we’re meant to find it highly relevant, a sort of sneak preview of what we’re meant to take away from the chapter. What I took away from the passage in which you used this song was the message — whether intentional or not — that Judy’s experience of the abortion simply doesn’t matter. Her choices don’t matter, and her feelings don’t matter. What matters is how she affects the male narrator. You can say that it’s your memoir, and that everything is couched in terms of how it affects the narrator because that’s how memoirs work, and that is fair in one sense. But you, as a writer, had a choice to give Judy a choice. You had a choice to make her feelings and her decisions equally important to your description of the abortion. It wasn’t an option you exercised.

2. Sex Work.

I definitely feel for you, on the depression front. I think your writing on that topic tends to be the best in the book. And I’ve seen people go through suicidal depressions, and been through some severe depressive episodes myself. Actually, you don’t need to know this, but my brother has a mental illness that results in a really high number of suicides. (Being passionate about attitudes toward disability and people with disabilities is, I think, something else we might very well have in common and agree on.) So that matters, and I have empathy there.

However, the key issue in the chapter about you paying for handjobs is not that you were depressed, but that you paid for some handjobs. Depression has never been powerful enough to get someone to drive to a place that sells handjobs, order a handjob, receive a handjob, and pay for the handjob, without his conscious knowledge or volition. And I’m sorry to be snarky there, but your defense above — “I was depressed, so,” almost as if there were a direct causal relationship between the two — seems not to take that into account.

Now: My own feelings about sex work are complicated. There are some women who legitimately choose sex work, from a variety of other options, and actually enjoy and like the work. It’s important to value what those women have to say, and not just demonize every form of sex work outright. There are other women, however, who dislike the work in the extreme, and are even severely traumatized by it, and who wind up in it due to poverty or marginalization — who would not be doing it, if they had other and better options. There’s forced prostitution; there’s human trafficking. Given the amount of information available about most bordellos — how they hire or buy their workers, whether the place is ethically and non-abusively run, how much of their earnings the workers there keep and whether they’re allowed to set their own boundaries in regard to the work they do — clients, such as yourself, often simply have no way of knowing whether the woman is there because she wants to be, or because she has to be, or whether she’s literally being forced into it. Clients often simply don’t know, to be perfectly blunt and risk pissing you off in the extreme, how much they’re hurting or sexually traumatizing the woman who’s servicing them. It might even be a slim chance, but given what kind of chance it is, I’d really strongly recommend against going to any place about which you don’t have detailed information about the operations and policies, no matter how strong the need for “human connection” might be.

But framing paid sex as a form of “human connection” is just another re-iteration of the problems with the Judy passage. There, again, women, and things that legitimately affect them, and can actually be oppressive or violent or profoundly traumatic for them, take a second place to the feelings of the male character. There, again, they are primarily important in terms of how they satisfy the male narrator. There, again, their inner lives are dismissed.

There are actually two sex workers in the chapter; one satisfactory, and one not. Which denotes that you liked the experience well enough to go back a second time. And it’s given a chapter in the book, which denotes that you don’t have a problem telling strangers about it. The first, Barbie, is described as follows:

“I imagine that when Barbie was a little girl she didn’t dream of someday giving handjobs to strangers while listening halfheartedly to elevator music, just as I couldn’t have anticipated that when I belted out “Glory of Love” I…”

And then it goes into a description of a song, which lasts for the rest of the page, part of the next page, includes some description casting the male narrator as the real victim in this scenario due to his feelings (“I was now a scared, lost, lonely man”) and ends when the male narrator ejaculates. That’s one line speculating on the many very serious problems Barbie may very well have encountered on her way to this particular handjob, and it’s given less narrative weight than a song from the Karate Kid II soundtrack. Barbie then says, “Would you like a hug?” This rates her a good review. And it gets the narrator to go back to the bordello. Here is how the second encounter is described:

“She nevertheless felt the need to make small talk — maybe that’s an occupational hazard — and it gradually came out that we’d both graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1999. And now here she was, straining to bring me to orgasm, the stern expression on her face betraying nothing — not fake happiness, not discomfort, just the stern determination of someone doing a job no matter how distasteful they find it. I yearned for the sweetness and odd vulnerability — however feigned — that characterized my first encounter at Hello, My Concubine. Two years earlier, we might have been classmates. Now I was paying her for something that barely constituted sex. I was tempted to feel sorry for her. [Again, emphasis mine.] She very well could have felt sorry for me. After all, my fellow Badger left our sordid encounter a hundred and sixty dollars richer while I left with a much lighter wallet and a pervasive sense of shame.”

Again, we cast the male narrator as the real victim here. Again, we just barely speculate on the women’s potential unhappiness. And again, the stakes for the women are really damn high. Objectively higher than they are for the male narrator, by far. He’s disappointed because his handjob wasn’t friendly enough. But sex workers are typically paid to, among other things, fake enthusiasm and friendliness. It’s how they get repeat customers. (You didn’t come back after encountering an unenthusiastic sex worker, did you?) We can reasonably assume that a relatively unfriendly, unenthusiastic sex worker is either very bad at her job, or going through a truly hellacious time of it. Which matters less, and is spoken about less, than how the male narrator feels about the handjob quality. Which matters less than whether this woman — who might very well be poor, abused, addicted, desperate, desperately unhappy, experiencing real and severe sexual trauma in this moment described — offers him “human connection.” And it doesn’t, one assumes, stop him from going through with the handjob in the first place.

I trust you can see the more obvious feminist problems with this.

So then we get to the open relationship. This comment is already longer than some posts, so I’m going to see if it will publish at this length, and then come back for that one.

Also, the chapter about the prostitute was about how I had lurched into such a crippling, suicidal depression that I was reduced to doing things I was deeply ashamed of out of a desperate need for any kind of human connection. I don’t know how that translates into bragging or talking about how much I love paying for sex.

Lastly, you talk about clear boundaries existing between me and the polyamorist without mentioning that I asked her to not tell me about other people she was having sex with. She agreed. Then, she decided to tell me about a giant orgy she had participated in. I didn’t want or expect her to fall in love with me. I just felt like not wanting to hear about other people she had had sex with was a fairly reasonable request.

I tried to write a book that was emotionally honest. I think I’m very upfront about the fact that a lot of my past relationship problems stemmed from my neuroses and hang-ups and insecurities. I very much appreciate a feminist critique of my memoir but I feel like you’re being pretty selective in what you choose to reveal about it.

Also, I think the girl Tom goes on the blind date with towards the end of the movie pretty much embodies your point. The movie sympathizes with Tom’s heart break, but still shows that he agreed to relationship terms he didn’t stick with.

I love your writing, it always makes me look at pop culture from a new perspective.

2. Summer spent the WHOLE time they were together looking at him like he had three heads. Like, every time he did or said something scary and clingy, she just looked at him like “WTF? Did we not JUST have this conversation five minutes ago?” I couldn’t see why she’d be in any kind of relationship with him- he was annoying, immature, and very clearly did not listen to a word she said.

I felt bad for the guy, I really did. But I also thought he was an idiot, and that Summer should have dropped him WAAAAY sooner.

The movie was cute, in a sort of toned down quirky-Phoebe “look at us being cute but we’re not trying to be cute we’re just cute, come on!” way. (I never respond well to that which relies so heavily on the saccharine.) Undoubtedly, the very endearing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance kept the movie from venturing into totally and completely cloying territory. But what I really want to talk about is Summer, of course.

I disliked her character on a pretty deep level, in large part because I know her schtick by heart. I know it because it’s mine, too. Really, she stole my act.

To start, you choose the dude who is obviously insecure, obviously inexperienced, obviously painfully aware the you are way, way out of his league. These kinds of guys will allow you to punish them indefinitely for merely having fallen in love with somebody so wonderful and elusive as you. Kiss them in the copy room and every middle school fantasy they’ve ever conjured has just come true. Fuck them once and you own them. The “that guy?” reactions from other dudes? Your lifeblood. Only a narcissist could really understand, and a narcissist you are. You don’t want to label things because you’re sort of a flower child insomuch as you’re very busy being nymphlike and flitting around saying ridiculous, vapid shit that, to them, sounds profound, but in a very subtle way, because you’re a butterfly and you can’t be pinned down and if you were all LaDiDa with a brain and a backbone you’d be Annie Hall and you can’t really be Annie Hall because you’re supposed to be authentic, and modern. So you torture them with your ambivalence for no better reason than that they don’t know better than to not let you, and what do you know, a few weeks later you’re married! You don’t really have any answers, because butterflies don’t have answers, just those pretty wings. And of course you show up at that special bench because it just wouldn’t be the same if you couldn’t twist the knife a little and know that even though he’s moving on and maybe getting over you he can never really be over you, because you’re everywhere. And you wouldn’t have it any other way. Because you’re a sadist. Oh, and a sadist who warned him. Yes, it is important that you warned him—how else would you come out of it blameless and batting your eyes? But oh, those eyes! Surely poison couldn’t taste so sweet?

And those are my thoughts. Summer is a Sadist, and while JGL’s character might also be flawed, he really isn’t the bad guy here. Really.