Since 1977, there has been a subset in American female literature, the tales of well educated women so comfortable with their education and empowerment that they spend their lives looking to be mangled by male jerks.
The first novel within that subset was LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR by Judith Rossner which was inspired by the 1973 murder of schoolteacher Roseann Quinn.
THERESA DUNN is a college educated woman who is a gifted teacher of deaf children.
But she is so empowered that she needs to become reckless and go mess around with jerks…” loses her virginity, to her much older, married college professor Martin. He ends their affair just before her graduation, leaving Theresa feeling used and lonely.
Theresa takes a job teaching deaf children, and proves to be a gifted and caring teacher. ….She frequents a bar at night, where she meets Tony, a charming but vain Italian-American. She ends up taking Tony to her apartment, taking cocaine with him and sleeping with him….
Through her job, Theresa also meets and dates an Irish-American welfare caseworker, James. Her parents approve of the responsible James, seeing him as a potential husband for Theresa. However, the couple do not have sex, because James wants a traditional courtship, and a monogamous relationship. Theresa sees that as stifling her freedom. Although James initially seems nice, over time he appears to become controlling, and also disrespectful of Theresa. Moreover, he shows signs of being just as perverted and selfish as Tony.
Meanwhile, Theresa begins to go out to more marginal places, and has sex with complete strangers, often older men. Tony eventually returns and acts as if nothing had happened. He barges in on Theresa while she is with another man, and chases the man away. Tony becomes controlling and abusive, and Theresa also discovers that he is a street hustler. She breaks up with Tony, but he stalks and harasses her, both at home and at her workplace. After imagining what could happen if Tony were to turn her in to the police as revenge, Theresa gathers up all of the drugs in her apartment and flushes them down the toilet.
With the New Year approaching, Theresa resolves to turn over a new leaf and take control of her life. Seeking one final hookup on New Year's Eve, Theresa picks up Gary, a sexually confused ex-convict, who tells Theresa that he has a pregnant wife in Florida. He has been living at the expense of other lovers who, it is strongly implied, are affluent gay men, since coming to the city. Although Gary is attracted to Theresa, when they are in bed together at her apartment, Gary finds himself unable to achieve an erection…... Theresa tells him that it is OK if they do not have sex, but Gary misinterprets this as questioning his sexuality. In a rage, Gary attacks her, rapes her, and then stabs her repeatedly with a knife, killing her in an orgy of blood…”
In this subset, education seems to have leeched women of common sense.
This Blogger is not a fan of Maya Angelou as a poetess, or as an exotic dancer or as a revolutionary; but he does admire her survival skills.
“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time,” Maya Angelou"
The empowerment of education seems to have caused in educated women the belief that their educated, empowered minds can change the brute in men. Good luck with that.
The latest book in this subset is IN THE LAND OF MEN by Adrienne Miller.
“Miller worked as an editorial assistant at the magazine GQ; then at the age of 25, she became the young fiction editor at ESQUIRE magazine.
She worked for and slept with the robust literary genius David Foster Wallace( picture below).
“…during their second phone conversation, Wallace complains to Miller that, at his recent book party, it took him seven tries to get a woman — that is, any woman — to agree to come up to his hotel room. Her response? She wonders why he’s “debasing” himself with her. Even more bafflingly, she blames herself for inviting Wallace’s crude banter. “Maybe I was the problem here. Maybe I wasn’t conveying any sense of gravitas. And maybe I was the one with boundary issues.”
Miller is similarly forgiving when, on their first date, he calls her Andrea instead of Adrienne. By the time Wallace declares that he prefers sleeping with women who don’t read, Miller, unable even to come up with a deflection, tells the reader, “I know, believe me, on every possible level, I know.”
And when he confesses that, during a “period of insanity,” he bought a gun and hired a hit man to kill someone — a version of a tale recounted on Twitter in 2018 by the writer Mary Karr, who also claimed that Wallace assaulted her and stalked her family members — the revelation appears to leave Miller similarly nonplused…..
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If “In the Land of Men” sometimes seems at odds with itself, it’s because Miller — who can be witty and knowledgeable about the clichés of fiction written by men — apparently regards Wallace as too special and too fragile to have been held to the rules that she applies to others. “Troubled male genius” is an old trope, but Miller elevates it to new heights.
Despite objecting to the hypersexualized female characters in Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest,” Miller describes his literary output as a “miracle” and “godlike,” while she calls Wallace a “towering colossus unto himself” and “one of the greatest and most uncompromising artists of all time.” At another point, she writes, “David surely had to have been as great as Tolstoy, his closest peer … in depicting how emotions are displayed on the body.” (Wait, what?!)
By the time she tells us that Wallace “changed the world” and compares him to Alexander the Great, I began to wonder if her praise, fulsome to the point of hagiographic, .... Wallace eventually replaces Miller with a woman about whom he says, “You may know more words than she does, but she’s better at cleaning my underwear.”
....Eros can lead to a kind of blindness. And it seems clear that Miller loved Wallace. What Miller loved about Wallace is harder to fathom. Or maybe the better question is why Miller didn’t love herself more. After he lashes out at her in a particularly cruel fashion, she recalls thinking, “His life is actually worth more than mine.” Even when lauding Wallace’s positive attributes, she denigrates herself: “Of course, given David’s experience résumé relative to mine, he had every right not to care too much about anything I had to say, but the guy really was the best active listener you could possibly imagine.”
Yet even Miller is eventually forced to admit that Wallace’s main area of interest is, well, Wallace….At their final lunch, Miller tells him she’s begun work on a novel of her own: “‘I wonder why you’re telling me this,’ he said acidly. Of course, David could never bring himself to offer me a token show of support or even display any phony interest in my writing. He was too competitive for that.”
Given Wallace’s earlier admission that, by and large, he doesn’t read female writers, it seems far more likely that he simply didn’t care…NEW YORK TIMES”.
One of this Blogger’s teachers at San Francisco State was James Leigh; near the end of his life, Leigh was living in Claremont, California, teaching, and playing clarinet with a jazz/blues band.
At a social gathering, given by James Leigh, this Blogger met David Foster Wallace, who was in Claremont; in fact Wallace killed himself in Claremont, age 46.
When this Blogger was a young man he was amazed about how little he knew about women; as he has aged, this Blogger is astonished and bewildered about how little women know about men.
Therefore, as a public service to Ms. Miller, this Blogger will explain Mr. Wallace to her; he wanted only one thing from her, from any of his women. He wanted her to get down on her knees and stick her head into an oven, turn on the gas, and go Sylvia Plath. He wanted his woman to be Sylvia Plath, to commit suicide over him, so he could fulfill his real ambition, to claim the mantle of poet Ted Hughes.
Not only did Sylvia Plath commit suicide over Hughes, that robust genius, so did “Assia Esther Wevill (15 May 1927 – 23 March 1969) was a German woman who escaped the Nazis at the beginning of World War II and emigrated to Pa;estine, then later the United Kingdom, where she had a relationship with the English poet Ted Hughes. She killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura using a gas oven, similar to Hughes's first wife Sylvia Plath's suicide, six years earlier.”
It is this Blogger's impression that Mr. Wallace, robust genius, would still be alive if Ms. Miller had killed herself; if two women had killed themselves over him, a la Ted Hughes, he would not only be alive but thriving.
Wallace killed himself because no woman he knew would kill themselves on his watch, no woman would make the blood sacrifice for the robust genius. That lack of sacrifice made him feel inadequate.
Before the advent of penicillin, one third of American women giving birth died from what was called child bed fever. That danger has passed; the result being that women, especially college educated women, seek out danger with jerks to replace the danger of childbirth.
College educated women should understand that there is no thrill in being associated with jerks; there is no thrill in being murdered by jerks, nor being threatened with murder by jerks.
The greatest thrill in life is the ability to wiggle your toes.
Ms. Miller and robust genius David Foster Wallace.
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