TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.5 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 94

Are Men Really So Bad?


By Pico Iyer


    Everyone knows, more than they would like perhaps, about
the nature, the publishing history and the unspeakable horrors
of Bret Easton Ellis' new novel, American Psycho. However
broadly it seeks to indict, in indelible, blood-red ink, the
excesses and depravities of the degenerate '80s, the book has
certainly raised a threshold of taste, or psychic pain, much
higher than most readers would like (much as the smash movie The
Silence of the Lambs exposes even toddlers to a level of
psychological violence that would have been unthinkable -- or
at least less powerful -- some years ago). A protagonist who
eats, tortures and dismembers victims is clearly assaulting all
that we hold sacred. And it is painfully easy to see the damage
such a book can do to the way in which men see, and therefore
treat, women.

    But what of the way the book treats men, and affects our
notion of them? Insofar as Ellis has deliberately created a
monstrous deformity, it is nonetheless striking that the monster
is male, and preys mostly on women; and insofar as he intends
a closer identification with his creation, the author himself
is implicated in the guilt. In either case, the culprit is a
male, and the novel is unlikely to endear the unfairer sex to
a nation that is already all too conscious of the harm men can
do.

    Ellis' plot line is, of course, true to criminal
statistics, and to our intuitive sense that terrible physical
violence is all too often perpetrated by men on women. But it
is very much to be hoped that the outrage would be no less if
Ellis' monster had been a woman, or more of its victims men (the
offense, in other words, lies not in the object of the sentences
but in the sentences themselves).

    Consider, for example, another just published novel, by
another highly touted young writer, which, if it gets less
exposure than Ellis', will probably win more praise: Two Girls,
Fat and Thin, by Mary Gaitskill. And consider for a moment how
the novel looks at men. The first of the eponymous girls is
repeatedly -- and graphically -- abused sexually by her father
(who, when not molesting her, pushes her down the stairs and
calls her "an argument for abortion"); the other girl is abused,
also graphically, at the age of five by a male friend of her
father's. The boys at the local high school are "murderously
aggressive" and have "monstrous voices"; the nicest of them is
blessed with "a morbidly cruel personality" and "seemed happiest
when torturing small animals by himself."

    The thin girl's first lover is a boy with "cruel lips" who
plays a rapist in the school play and more or less carries that
role over to real life; her most attractive lover is "an
abusive mental case" whose eyes "glitter with the adrenal malice
of a sex criminal." Everywhere one looks there are repulsive
men, "fat creatures mostly, baked pink and bearded, their
self-satisfaction and arrogance expressed in their wide,
saggy-bottomed hips." Meanwhile, in the background, we see a
constant procession of "abusive lovers," porn collectors and
groping, "gloating" lechers. The only faintly appealing male in
304 pages -- his name is Knight -- ran away from home "to escape
an alcoholic father" and gently betrays his fiance. Small
wonder, then, that at novel's end, one girl concludes that most
men are "really awful" and the other rails against "the chemical
and hormonal forces that goad that sex to kill, rape and commit
crimes of horrific sadism." The men in Gaitskill's first book
are, if anything, even worse.

    All this is fair enough, perhaps, and true to the way life
may seem to many contemporary young women. It could be said
that women do not fare much better in Gaitskill's world, and
that this view of men reflects in part the distorted vision of
two neurotic girls (though if so, Gaitskill suggests, that is
because of the ill treatment they have suffered at the hands of
men). It could even be argued that this is how women apprehend
a world largely fashioned by the likes of Bret Easton Ellis. Yet
to say this is to draw dangerously close to the case for
American Psycho: by revealing disgusting attitudes, it reveals
its disgust for such attitudes. And just imagine, for a moment,
that the pronouns were reversed, and that every woman in a long
and serious novel was treated as oppressive: Would there not be
an uproar? And is Gaitskill's form of emotional violence really
much better than the more viscerally appalling kind?

    None of this, of course, is to deny or defend the abuse of
women in much male fiction; nor is it to make the perverse point
that a man mistreating women is simply giving a bad name to
men. It is, rather, to suggest that sometimes, for whatever
reasons, the violence flows in the other direction too, and in
ways no less insidious for being less conspicuous. Meryl Streep
and others have rightly complained that all the best roles in
movies go to men; but a medium that takes Schwarzenegger and
Stallone as its heroes is not being so kind to men either. The
two hottest box-office movies not so long ago -- The Silence of
the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy -- both portrayed men as
psychopaths and bullies taking out their sicknesses on plucky,
intelligent women; such critical favorites as GoodFellas and the
Godfather trilogy merely replace monsters with mobsters. If
Hollywood still too often treats women as bimbos and hookers,
it is apt to see men as homicidal maniacs; the sad truth of it
may be that all of us -- in pop culture's imagination -- are
diminished as often as uplifted.

    Again, this is not to exonerate Ellis; it is only to say
that the interaction of the sexes, like everything else, can
only be demeaned if it is caricatured as a contest of black
against white. And in our justifiable sensitivity to certain
kinds of violence, we may blind ourselves to others. As it is,
students are being taught in school that "patriarchal" is the
worst kind of insult, and misogynists must be sought out
everywhere. But what is the term for misogyny in reverse? It
sometimes seems that we would rectify a long history of violence
against women by simply engaging in violence against everyone:
equal-opportunity abuse. And that we would seek to replace one
kind of double standard with another. Might it not be better to
try to raise our vision of both parties?