Bad Behavior: Stories

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Maybe there would be men [for whom] it would purely be a need for power, but not in the character I’ve created. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. But I’ve never heard of men, as a group, getting together again and again to attack women they’re related to. She refers to a scene in which Quin playfully spanks a younger co-worker, a woman who becomes one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against him.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads Veronica by Mary Gaitskill | Goodreads

For a long time, anyone interested in more forthright declarations of Gaitskill’s opinions needed to hunt them down. The narrator, Allison is in her 40's, cleaning offices for a living, as we go back through her thoughts to a time when she made it as a model. The feminist had evaded something important, according to the journalist, by changing gears so abruptly: “the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene.After he ejaculates on her during another spanking session, Debby quits her job but says nothing to members of her family, although they can tell “something hideous” has happened. What appeals to me these days is no longer the titillating content, or even the brazen selfhood of the female characters (though I’m still into both of those things). Second Reading: I often read bits of this book for inspiration in my own writing, and recently I decided I needed to read it again in toto. When he asked about how she chose the “sexual battlefield” as her subject matter, she let out what’s described as an “audible sigh. She was not responsible for other people’s actions, but her upsetting sexual encounters prompted her to reexamine her own motivations and desires.

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill | Waterstones

By offering us a portrait of ourselves, lonely and uncertain and vulnerable, she finds that miracles occur: rapprochement and forgiveness, sudden kinds of intimacy and, if not love, then recognition. It’s very different from publishing something out there in the world, in print or even an online publication. She’d lied “not for revenge but in service of… the metaphorical truth – although what that truth was is not at all clear to me”. If you put up no resistance, if you didn’t struggle or say anything, I don’t think you could expect a man in that context to really know, ‘No, she doesn’t want this’.

In that sense, they are not so different in attitude from those ladies dedicated to establishing feminist-based rules and regulations for sex. Their friendship will survive not only Alison’s reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica’s terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS.