Publisher: Pantheon Page Count: 83 Year Published: 2019
Synopsis: “Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident.
The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable.
Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.”
The #MeToo Movement shook the world when women, long silenced, finally gained attention for being honest about the toxic environments they endured where they were sexually harassed and assaulted. Many watched with bated breath as more and more people came forward to accuse aggressors of inappropriate and harmful behavior. Soon, it started to feel as if no one was off-limits, as if the social customs in place for generations had created a society filled with aggressors, many of whom feigned the good ‘ol boys defense of “that’s just the way things were.” Guilt became a semantics argument of whether the person was just “kidding around” or was actually assaulting or harassing someone. While “believe women” trended on social media platforms, there were some who whispered that maybe the movement had gone too far, needed to be reeled in. That we shouldn’t go back in time and criticize people for actions that were “commonplace” at the time, in their context.
This Is Pleasure seems to crack that argument wide open, exploring how two people — the accused and a very close, female friend of his–confront the accusers coming forward to express disdain and share trauma from encounters with him. Quin is the archetype white male in a male-dominated workforce whose friendliness covers inappropriate gestures, whose boisterous nature is “just how he is,” whose off-putting sexualization of those around him is just him being a man who loves women. The story is set in an office, and we meet him as he finds his life leveled by accusations of misconduct. Margot, his long-time friend, struggles to accept that every accusation is true and that every accuser was a victim.
The story is uncomfortable, raw, and honest. It explores arguments that were heard throughout the rise of the #MeToo movement and reeks of a refusal to take responsibility, to recognize the system as broken and the actions as wrong.
Quin:
“I wonder, if those girls were girls now, would they describe themselves as ‘assaulted’ if someone put his hand on their knee? Would they say that they were too ‘frozen’ in dismay to stop him? / What a different story we told ourselves then. How aware we were that it was a story.”
Margot:
“People were shocked when I showed sympathy for him…”
This is Pleasure, pp. 75, 53
I’m not sure this story is for everyone. At roughly 85 pages, it is a brief exploration of a deeply complex issue. Still, I think its a perspective that exists in the world that should be considered so that we may more effectively reform our social norms in order to prevent harassment and assault in the workplace and in other spaces.
Have you read this one?
Read It Like Rory 