This work comes across as the tedious provocations of a man desperate for any negative attention he can get. “Women, asked to describe the best sexual experience of their lives, almost always mention an exceedingly brief thing they had decades ago with a near-convict,” he declares. Upon viewing scads of hacked celebrity nudes from 2014’s The Fappening, he is filled with “relief”: “these women are as sad and afraid and shy—above all, shy—about sex as we are,” he writes, hiding behind highly dubious collectivity. “The shape of a high-end sports car’s rear end is meant to replicate a bubble-butted woman’s,” he asserts, and “pink is associated with girls because it’s the color of their pussies; blue is associated with boys because it’s the color of the veins in their cocks.” Life is too short to indulge such rapturous dilettantism. Even immortals would roll their eyes.
Lili Boisvert’s most radical moment comes when she acknowledges certain pleasures granted to women that are usually denied to straight men, such as reveling in being lusted after and having “eyes glued to their bodies.” Many feminists would hold the party line that such thrills are unremitting burdens, or inherently degrading, but not Boisvert. “We can concede the injustice,” she writes. “Men do not have access to this power.” And with this concession, she touches on a vital element of the magnanimous chauvinist’s psyche. Men have for centuries told themselves that their obsession with women’s bodies is the real gendered injustice, that women are allowed to be parasitical because we’re sexually indispensable, and if men were (objectively, biologically) beautiful, or if women liked sex as much as men do, they would be the pampered gender. Mailer’s diagnosis still fits (who would know better than he?): “In the profound pussy envy of men there is the simple even sentimental suspicion that it is easy to be a woman—one need merely lie back and all Heaven will come into the cunt.” Many tenacious and deeply felt fantasies ride on this conviction, not only those pertaining to sex but those that prop up gender essentialism, misogyny, male supremacy—entire worldviews. True liberation is to be an idol: a “worshipped” object free from obligation, a valuable piece of property expected only to please the eye.
- Bookforum
