It’s the Dick Cheney doctrine: if there’s even a 1% chance that one of these lady writers might describe either my penis or sexual performance in less than flattering terms, then women can’t write about such things.  That’s just not cool, NOT COOL!

Amanda, I am confused—can you put in a link for “kerfluffle”?  I clicked on the Kat Stoeffel link but didn’t find criticism of the writer there.  Stoeffel’s piece was kinda tl;dr too so I didn’t get to the bottom of it.  I’d google but don’t want to hassle the Hollywood actor whose name was appropriated.

Man, sometimes I want to shoot the Internet right between the eyes for sending every half-literate tedium-thon ever typed to make a home in my browser.  Unpublished writers, unless you have something amusing to say, I’d really rather not know what you did last night.

I wouldn’t call the essay feminist. But a feminist can appreciate the irony of this situation.

You’ve got a Big Man Author who uses his status to exploit a Much Younger and Less Powerful Woman. He treats her like shit. In the old days, he could have gotten away with it. Part of what it meant to be a powerful man was that you had carte blanche to use and discard lower status women with no consequences. Because who’s she going to tell? She’s a nobody. She doesn’t know anybody he cares about. She doesn’t have a literary agent or a publisher.

Time was when a man had insurance against ladies kissing and telling because a lady couldn’t even admit she had sex without hurting herself far more than she could possibly hurt him, thanks to the old sexist double standard about female chastity.

Now, we’ve got the Internet and a little female sexual liberation and suddenly, powerful men don’t have the same freedom to exploit vulnerable women because these women can go on tumblr and tell the whole world.

There is a certain delicious irony to the fact that a guy can no longer use his reputation to seduce a much younger woman without putting his reputation at risk. It used to be safe to target 21-year-olds with nothing to lose. Now it’s dangerous in its own way. After all, they’ve got nothing to lose and you’ve got a reputation to uphold. Men have become more like women. The playing field has been leveled.

I’m not saying it’s inherently good, or feminist, to sexually humiliate your exes in public. But kissing and telling isn’t all the same. If you just do it to shame someone for having sex, that’s despicable. But if you do it to get back at them for genuinely reprehensible behavior, that’s different. 

In an ideal feminist world, everyone would have the option of exposing maltreatment.

It’s good that even the mightiest can now be brought low by relatively powerless people in the internet. Just the fact that everyone theoretically has some recourse is a subtle incentive to make the powerful behave better.

Unree, I linked the Observer 3-page description, and the 60—-60!—-page piece, but don’t have a shorter link.

I appreciate your point, Lindsay. I tossed this story out to my dude, and he saw it like you do: a level playing field, and all dudely angst about it is nothing but anger that certain privileges have been yanked.

Thank you ever so much for bringing the phrase Fond Memories of Vagina to me. Really, I can’t thank you enough. I have loathed since I was a high-school nerd that genre of High Literary Tumescence and all those awful mid-C20 canonical authors that practiced it. Do you have any idea how many of these assholes you have to wade through to get a doctorate in literature. Way, way too many: I assure you. And now I have such a better name for it than High Literary Tumescence. Thanks again. I can’t wait to use the phrase on students.

But man, you can tell the ones when it’s nerds who just can’t get over the fact that people will fuck them now, and have to keep proving it to themselves over and over. That’s the person you really don’t want to be.

Hey, easy now. A lot of us went through that our sophomore year of college.

I feel like my good in the world has been done, felagund. Though really, Sady gets all the credit.

@4 Amanda, thanks, but I don’t see any kerfluffle.  Not many people have paid attention, looks like.

FWIW, I agree with you and Lindsay @3 that it’s good for the less powerful person to have recourse.  But there’s only so much she can do without (a) finding her shift key and (b) a modicum of expressive talent.  I could. not. get. through Marie Calloway’s prose to find out how the gentleman in question treated her like shit, and the post and comments here at Pandagon don’t say.

But there’s a takeaway: If you can’t write yet want some power, save the famous writer’s words in your hard drive, a la Monica Lewinsky not bringing her dress to the cleaners after President Clinton had put it to infamous use.  I’m serious.  Stoeffel has an anecdote:

The New York Post wrote a series of items about an affair between Salman Rushdie and Devorah Rose, the self-made socialite editor of Social Life magazine. When Mr. Rushdie abruptly cut off contact and publicly denied their relationship, Ms. Rose forwarded their Facebook correspondence to Page Six, revealing a less eloquent side of Mr. Rushdie. (“You look so gorgeous & hottt,” he had told her.)

I was horrified to learn that Salman Rushdie had written ‘hottt.’

On the topic of having sex because you want to vs because you need validation, here’s a quote: “When I’m with a man, it’s because *I* like *him*, not because I want *him* to like *me*.”—Blanche Devereaux

I dunno, I actually have sympathy here for “Brody” and suspect we’re not hearing the whole story. I used to read this girl’s tumblr in a train-wreck sort of way and she wrote all sorts of crap like this, using some of the same details as showed up in this piece, making me think it’s at least partly fabricated. I’ve also met “Brody” socially a few times through various events and never got the sense from him that he’s anything like how he’s presented here, and his writing has always seemed genuine too, though I suppose it could all be one big smokescreen. I just know that he’s one of the few male writers who addresses “women’s issues” as though they’re “people issues.” Even if everything in the piece is true, the worst thing he did is give in to ego. By Calloway’s own account he wasn’t treating her like shit, he was just being unwise (and a little skeevy, but what writing about sex doesn’t make the participants seem to be so?). Whatever the case, I’m astounded this has gotten any attention. There are so many excellent female writers on “female subjectivity” and first-person stories that really do reveal something that this just seems lurid. Moving on.

Oh, Jessica…..more men are like this than any of us would like to admit. It’s a painful thing to admit, but man, if she invented it, she has a REMARKABLE imagination, of the sort that her otherwise unimaginative writing would simply argue against. I’m sorry, but her lack of skill makes this whole thing believable. It’s clear that girlfriend believes it, too…..

Yeah, I wish that there weren’t guys who presented like feminist, progressive guys who would deliberately fuck a vulnerable 21-year-old with serious issues behind their girlfriend’s back. Life just ain’t fair. But what we can do is raise the price of being the guy singing feminism in public while doing this shit in private.

He did much worse than “give in to ego”. A humanist doesn’t exploit vulnerable young women radiating serious self-esteem issues to stick it to the girls who didn’t fuck them in high school. You just….don’t. You grow up.

I hate to say it, but she’s a remarkably good writer for a 21-year-old grappling with long form autobiographical writing. The essay sucks, of course, but that’s because the subject is boring and she’s immature. Those are fixable problems. With a good editor and some life experience, she could go far.

Thank goodness there was no Facebook, no Blogger, no LiveJournal when I was her age. Her piece felt like a time capsule for not precisely what I was up to at that age, but the tortuous, boring conversation I dragged everywhere I took my bad self. Jeez, can you imagine being 40 and having to respond to the constant requests for affirmations about appearance, the queries about the level of “connection”, etc?

I agree with Lindsay that she has some talent. While I don’t entirely buy her narrative, she does manage to tell the stories of two individuals having two divergent personalities & experiences. And given the memoir format, the reader gets an extra frisson at seeing things the writer probably doesn’t herself see.

ladies selling stories of Cocks I Have Known

This immediately made me think of the *original* Cocks (and Breasts) I Have Known: http://www.cynthiaplastercaster.com/

Sadly, I find her account incredibly believable. I’m unclear what parts are so hard to believe. Anyone care to elaborate?

  Some thoughts:

  1. I first thought this post was going to be about how bookish nerds should accept the disappearance of paper books and deal with a future where everybody has e-readers.

  2. The essay in question was like a Philip Roth novel but much less well written. Philip Roth might be narcissistic but he can write devastingly good prose and he has ideas.

  3. I still do not get May-December romances/sex. It just seem really weird to have sex with, date, or be in a relationship with somebody who was already grown up, at least biologically if not mentally, when you were child. The experience differences are very great. My least favorite movies are the ones where men old enough to be my father are with women young enough to be my sisters, if I had sisters and I’m a heterosexual man.

  4. An addition/summary of Amanda’s advice, if you are feeling depressed about the amount of sex other people besides you seem to be having, remember this: people lie about their love and sex alives, alot. They lie to make themselves seem to be more romantically and sexually active than they usually are or on rarer occassions, less active so that others don’t see themselves as well you know. Also, people have to study, work, go see doctors, pay taxes, and do a bunch of other activities that generally cuts down on the amount of time they get for love and/or sex.

I don’t understand what the big deal is. She asked for his permission to write about him. He said OK.

Maybe it’s a little unfair to his girlfriend, but she’s already with a writer/quasi-public figure so this is preesumably a known risk.

What did this lady do wrong?

It might be that you have to walk around on the edge of the cliff for awhile before you realize you don’t really want to jump into a lake of fail but it is amazing when people of advanced age have this disconnect between what they do and who they want to be, as in, not a simple idiot.  Some people think its because they are in a haze of love and so just don’t care what tongues may wag about but its not love of another human, its love of yourself and you are just a common asshole, yea people don’t forget that stuff, its the saddest funny corner of the universe.

After checking the Tiger Beatdown link, it appears that I’ve never read one of these novels.  I’m curious if people could list some other quintessential examples for my amusement.

I did like this line.  It’s an elegant dissection:

“...he is able to take women’s measurements on sight with eerie precision…” 

I hate that technique, “Though the smile was warm, a quiver at the corner of her mouth betrayed a deep emotional pain…blah blah…”  Bullshit, you didn’t see that.  Is this a Sherlock Holmes story now?

I can’t accurately interpret quivering lips or twinkling eyes on people I’ve known for several decades, much less been able to penetrate the complexities of their psyche with a wayward glance.  I tend to confuse distant looks with contemporary boredom and pained micro-expressions as needing to use the toilet, but perhaps I don’t possess the discerning eye of a novelist.  It just strikes me as a hacky way of introducing history and context or portending a later reveal.

But in the genre described at Tiger Beatdown it has an especially condescending vibe, “Silly woman trying to play tough in the business world with your pantsuit, I spy the little girl hiding underneath your professional exterior, now I will fuck it.”  I’m pretty sure that the subtle glance probably means, “why is this old bastard staring at me like that?  I hope he doesn’t touch my leg again.”

Thank you, thank you Sady Doyle, and you Amanda for introducing me to the phrase “Fond memories of a vagina”.  I fucking hated my post modern literature class my senior year in college because out of the entire genre, my professor only picked these types of books and then threw in one Toni Morrison for good measure.  Not being a writer myself, I was at a loss to describe why Toni Morrison’s one book was vastly superior to all of these nauseating pieces.  The best I could think of is that it seemed that all these dudes were doing was masterbating while flexing their biceps for an audience while Morrison invites the reader into a fun make-out session.

“Silly woman trying to play tough in the business world with your pantsuit, I spy the little girl hiding underneath your professional exterior, now I will fuck it.”

Hey look, a plot summary of 500 Days of Summer.

“I hit the last guy I had sex with, too”

It would have been nice if she’d mentioned that before offering to have sex with him.  Definitely, she should with any future sex partners, now that she knows it is a strong tendency.

I thought it was Garland Grey who wrote that and coined “Fond Memory of Vagina”.

Lee #19:

The disappearance of books will never happen. Nobody’s yet found a digital archive format (except possibly optar printed on Tyvek or microfiche) that beats paper as an archival medium, so anything worth saving will likely be printed out and kept in a library at some point. (That, however, does mean there will be a lot of small authors who will only ever be published in digital media, making some of them the exception to what I said about “anything worth saving”.)

@Amanda - what I didn’t entirely buy was the conversation, specifically the level of detail (and probably accuracy) of what she remembered saying vs what she says he did. It’s possible she initiated topics and solicited his opinions as much as she did, and he was only half-way present, hanging out in the margins and reacting to her actions and words as much as he appears to have done. But her desire to control the narrative, to retroactively control the encounter, is so strong it probably exerted a subtle pull on everything.

But mostly I do buy that it’s roughly what occurred and was said.

  BrianX: I know I was just being a bit silly withe the title of the post.

Yeah, I wish that there weren’t guys who presented like feminist, progressive guys who would deliberately fuck a vulnerable 21-year-old with serious issues behind their girlfriend’s back.

You are letting this young woman off way too easy. I didn’t read her entire story, but it does appear that she was the one who offered to sleep with him, with little or no prompting from him. At 21 she is more than old enough to know what she was doing. The guy is a jerk mainly for cheating on his girlfriend. (And on that count, the young woman knew that the guy had a girlfriend, and slept with him anyway, which makes her just as guilty as him.)

If there are two people in a cheating situation, one who is cheating, and one who isn’t, I blame the cheater. Period. Making passes at people who are involved isn’t cool, but it’s not like you promised someone you love that you’d be faithful. Much different. She’s an idiot, but he’s the cheater. Men—-yes, even men—-can say no. If you promise you’ll turn down offers, do it.

Fair enough, he’s guiltier than her. But knowingly screwing somebody else’s SO is still pretty unethical in my book (and I say that as someone who has said no in exactly that situation.)

Yeah, it’s bad. But there’s already a strong narrative that blames women and women only for a man’s cheating. His partner is blamed for somehow not “taking care” of him, and his cheating partner is blamed for seducing him. The assumption that men can’t say no is strong in this society, and I reject it out of hand. Men can say no, and if someone throws herself at you, that doesn’t mitigate your responsibility. It’s exactly as bad as if you were the one who sought out the sex.

  This is an interesting question. There are many people involved in romantic and sexual relationships with partners attached to others and are unaware of this. These people might be a bit on the clueless side but they aren’t really cheaters because they did not intentionally go after attached partners. Than there are people who knowingly enter romantic and sexual relationships with attached people. Sometimes they focus on going after attached people and completely ignore unattached people. Are they cheaters Like Amanda, I think the burden is on the attached person not to enter into another romantic or sexual relationship (this is assuming monogamy). People do not need to accept any offer of romance or sex. The offering party might be doing something stupid but stupidity doesn’t need to be reciprocated.

Lee, I dated someone who was 60 when I was 40. Since we were introduced to each other by mutual friends, I don’t think either of us realized how big an age gap we had until several dates later.

It was actually much less weird than the 20 year old guy I dated when I was 16.

I just want to chime in and say that I completely agree with Amanda and Lee #33 and #34. It’s not anyone’s responsibility to police the monogamous relationships of others. I’ve actually been a cheating third-party a couple of times (but I’ve never cheated on a partner). I only think I was morally in the wrong when it was with a friend’s girlfriend. I think in that case, where you know and have trust with the person being cheated on, it’s fucked up. I felt guilty for a long time after that, but when a girl cheated with me and I barely knew her boyfriend, I really don’t think I did anything wrong. If she hadn’t cheated with me, she would have cheated with someone else and/or they would have broken up anyway.

As for “Adrian Brody”, I’d say the situation is feminist, although the story itself isn’t, from what I’ve heard about it. I tend to think there’s always something morally suspect when people manipulate a power-imbalance to get laid. Obviously, there are degrees of wrongness, but even Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Rule” (which I am NOT endorsing) says that if you divide your age by 2, and add 7, that’s the minimum age for a prospective partner. For a 40 year old, that’s 27, which isn’t even close to 21. Besides, if you cheat on your partner, I don’t think you have a right to expect the person you’re cheating with not to tell the person you’re cheating on.

Also, I think someone said this earlier, but Garland Grey wrote “Fond Memories of Vagina” not Sady Doyle.

Amanda@14,15: Having read her account, I don’t think he can fairly be accused of intentionally exploiting a vulnerable young woman with self-esteem issues.  She was the one who offered to fuck him sight unseen, and it wasn’t at all clear that he was thinking of sex with her prior to her offer.  A lot of the vulnerability and self-esteem stuff only became evident through the pillow talk once they were having sex. or at least making out with the intention of having sex.  Unless you think he should have picked up on this through her other writings that he had read, or that he should assume that any 21-year old woman who wants to fuck an older writer she admires is especially vulnerable with self-esteem issues, I’m inclined to give him a pass on this part.  Also, if he only has 15 lifetime sexual partners at forty, it doesn’t sound like he’s making a career of cruising younger vulnerable women.

The part about cheating on his girlfriend is a different story.  Of course he should have declined her offer if he was in a committed relationship.  But relationships can be complicated beasties, and I don’t think this makes him a hypocrite about being a humanist/feminist the same way deliberate exploitation would.

By “the situation”, I mean the fact that a famous guy didn’t get away with manipulating his celebrity to cheat on his girlfriend with a much younger woman.

What’s wrong with any of this, other than that it’s a little boring?  A woman wrote to a New York writer and asked him to have sex with her.  He said “come on out.”  They had sex.  It was OK.  The writer tried to be nice but his contempt for her showed through a little.  The woman tried a few manipulative tricks to try to keep him on the hook, but they didn’t work.  She wrote about it.  Tao Lin published it. 

The End

Obviously you shouldn’t cheat on your girlfriend, but…  there’s nothing to see here.  Nobody treated anybody like shit.  That’s the main problem with the story - there’s no twist.  It basically unfolds how you would expect.

So, I’m the only bookish nerd who is deeply concerned that we on the left have a “famous author” who is apparently a real-life 40 year-old grown up, who is also rambling about NYC chain-smoking and chattering about how everyone besides him is a phony?

Really?

No, I think he’s a despicable person, because if he had any sense he’d turn down the ‘offer’, even if he wasn’t in a committed relationship when she made it to him.