Lady Business: Man vs. food, woman vs. bad writing, Rob Porter vs. evidence
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventeenth issue, published February 15, 2018.
Fifty Shades of Food Porn
I was traveling up and down the East Coast for work last week, which means I couldn’t immediately write about some potentially perfect Lady Business stories: The stock market maybe misses Janet Yellen; the White House is doing its unwitting best to raise awareness of domestic abuse; and Lady Doritos were almost a thing. (Because women, or at least some women who are not me, don’t like crunchy snack foods…?)
But in honor of Valentine’s Day yesterday and its deluge of desperate news pegs, let’s first turn to romance. Or at least sex. Or whatever this is:
One day while he was working on his book “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen made squid for dinner. The recipe required him to grasp the raw squid and place his fingers deep inside its inner cavity. A little light bulb went off in his head. “I thought, ‘It reminds me of something,’” he said recently.
Yes, that … brainstorm … led to a Pulitzer Prize-winning depiction of a man-on-squid encounter, one that helped win Nguyen a MacArthur Genius Grant. (Really.) One that helped The Sympathizer take its place in the Annals of Prestigious Literature, along with other novels about men really playing with their food. Think Philip Roth’s man-on-liver interlude in Portnoy’s Complaint and the man-on-peach dalliance in André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. (Does this mean the American Pie movies were actually highbrow?)
The acclaim for all of this literal food porn makes an interesting contrast to the rampant tittering over Fifty Shades of Grey, a poorly-written series of novels-turned-movies about a woman enjoying a lot of “argh!”-filled sex. (At least no one defiles dinner.) NPR’s Linda Holmes, writing about the new movie, is particularly deft at parsing why Fifty Shades doesn’t work and should be criticized—not for being a trashy pulp series per se, but for being bad at its chosen genre of trashy pulp:
It's easy to write off Fifty Shades Freed with the same sneer the books have been subjected to since they appeared, which is to treat it as an inherently hilarious effort to appeal to the prurient interests of square, easily scandalized middle-aged women. (Appealing to the prurient interests of square, easily scandalized middle-aged men is called "premium cable." Ha ha! Just kidding, it's also a lot of basic cable.) There's nothing wrong with erotic literature — or film — for women. There's nothing wrong or surprising about fantasy material for moms or aunts or whatever you want to call it. It just would be nice if it were ... better.
But anyway, we were talking about more serious literature. Pulitzer-Prize-winning, MacArthur Genius Grant-winning, novels about Important Topics. Like sex with food.
There’s a viciously funny grudge at the heart of The Sympathizer, a long-nurtured takedown of Apocalypse Now and its whitewashing of the Vietnam War. Nguyen has gotten praise (and those awards) for writing about the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese, the actual people most affected by the war in their country. It just would be nice, to quote Holmes, if the rest of the book was … better. Much, much better.
I’m not even talking about the squid sex, which I’d honestly forgotten. I was more immediately traumatized by Nguyen’s hilariously terrible prose, including his narrator’s musings about “an inflamed piranha of one’s anus” and “a snarled firehose of my bowels.”
Or my favorite line, and now-standard bar order: “I liked my Scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth.”
Mostly I hated that The Sympathizer’s climactic revelation, and the male protagonist’s greatest trauma, boiled down to (spoilers!) yet another rape scene. It’s a tired narrative device in general, especially from male writers who apparently can’t imagine worse fates and who so often end up writing, as Wired’s Laura Hudson put it in 2015, “stories about how men feel about women getting raped, rather than how those women feel about their own assaults.”
The Sympathizer is super-guilty on this account. The rape scene exists solely for the protagonist to observe, and feel tortured over, an assault happening to someone else. It also neatly allows Nguyen to narrate a nameless woman’s gang rape in sexualized, near-pornographic details of who-did-what-to-whom, in what order, with what body parts. “Pleasure of this degree should always be kept private,” Nguyen writes of his rapists’ reactions, “unless everyone was participating, as in a carnival or an orgy.”
That was the point at which I had the same reaction I had to reading the first Fifty Shades book: namely, to want to throw my Kindle against the wall, hard. Which is not a defense of Fifty Shades. But nobody’s giving E.L. James prestigious literary prizes or genius grants. And whatever her other crimes against the English language, James is not responsible for lines like this:
“Nothing was more delicious than the foie gras of hatred, once one had acquired the taste for it.”
Believe Women
There’s been some excellent writing about Rob Porter’s hideously violent record, and the White House’s efforts to ignore or erase his past. I especially liked Dahlia Lithwick’s scathing Slate examination of Porter’s political rise, even while his ex-wives were reporting his domestic violence to the police and the FBI and their churches and anyone else who could stop him:
Please stop asking why women don’t come forward. These women did. They believed that once the police, the FBI, the White House, and John Kelly knew what they knew, Porter would stop ascending in their ranks. They were wrong.
Related, I give money to Sanctuary for Families, a nonprofit helping New York area survivors of domestic abuse and trafficking. I’m having trouble finding a good, recent list of other highly-rated nonprofits around the country addressing domestic violence –please let me know if you recommend one, and I’ll put it in a future newsletter! There also are some suggestions in this 2015 NYMag roundup of all sorts of charities and this recent Washington Post column about how hard it is for victims of domestic abuse to be believed.
Lady Bits
“The painting is shocking because Sherald has somehow conjured a vision of Michelle Obama, one of the most photographed women in history, that we have not yet seen.”
--I really enjoyed the Brooklyn Museum’s recent retrospective on Georgia O’Keeffe, which encompassed not only her art but also her clothes and her furnishings and her lifetime hobby as a model for other artists. But, as this thoughtful T Magazine essay points out, why do women artists get this private-life treatment in exhibitions, while men are far more likely to get retrospectives focused solely on their art?
-I’ve mentioned before my enduring appreciation for Grey’s Anatomy, and I’m impressed by how directly this season is addressing the persistent, insidious gender bias in medical care. The latest episode explicitly discussed the United States’ abysmal maternal mortality rate—right after an episode in which Bailey couldn’t get doctors at a rival hospital to believe she was having a heart attack. That reflects reality for almost half of women with heart disease, and especially for black women, this Pacific Standard piece points out: “As one woman in the study said, 'Doctors think that men have heart attacks and women have stress.'"
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com