David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

B.I. #72 08-98

NORTH MIAMI BEACH FL

‘I love women. I really do. I love them. Everything about them. I can’t even describe it. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones, thin. From drop-dead to plain. To me, hey: all women are beautiful. Can’t get enough of them. Some of my best friends are women. I love to watch them move. I love how different they all are. I love how you can never understand them. I love love love them. I love to hear them giggle, the different little sounds. The way you just can’t keep them from shopping no matter what you do. I love it when they bat their eyes or pout or give you that little look. The way they look in heels. Their voice, their smell. Those teeny red bumps from shaving their legs. Their little dainty unmentionables and special little womanly products at the store. Everything about them drives me wild. When it comes to women I’m helpless. All they have to do is come into a room and I’m a goner. What would the world be without women? It’d — oh no not again behind you look out! ’

B.I. #28 02-97

YPSILANTI MI [SIMULTANEOUS]

K—:‘What does today’s woman want. That’s the big one.’

E—:‘I agree. It’s the big one all right. It’s the what-do-you-call….’

K—:‘Or put another way, what do today’s women think they want versus what do they really deep down want .’

E—:‘Or what do they think they’re supposed to want.’

Q.

K—:‘From a male.’

E—:‘From a guy.’

K—:‘Sexually.’

E—:‘In terms of the old mating dance.’

K—:‘Whether it sounds Neanderthal or not, I’m still going to argue it’s the big one. Because the whole question’s become such a mess.’

E—:‘You can say that again.’

K—:‘Because now the modern woman has an unprecedented amount of contradictory stuff laid on her about what it is she’s supposed to want and how she’s expected to conduct herself sexually.’

E—:‘The modern woman’s a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.’

K—:‘It’s what makes it so difficult to know what they want. Difficult but not impossible.’

E—:‘Like take your classic Madonna-versus-whore contradiction. Good girl versus slut. The girl you respect and take home to meet Mom versus the girl you just fuck.’

K—:‘Yet let’s not forget that overlayed atop this is the new feminist-slash-postfeminist expectation that women are sexual agents, too, just as men are. That it’s OK to be sexual, that it’s OK to whistle at a man’s ass and be aggressive and go after what you want. That it’s OK to fuck around. That for today’s woman it’s almost mandatory to fuck around.’

E—:‘With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you fuck around.’

K—:‘Do but don’t. A double bind.’

E—:‘A paradox. Damned either way. The media perpetuates it.’

K—:‘You can imagine the load of internal stress all this dumps on their psyches.’

E—:‘Come a long way baby my ass.’

K—:‘That’s why so many of them are nuts.’

E—:‘Out of their minds with internal stress.’

K—:‘It’s not even really their fault.’

E—:‘Who wouldn’t be nuts with that kind of mess of contradictions laid on them all the time in today’s media culture?’

K—:‘The point being that this is what makes it so difficult, when for example you’re sexually interested in one, to figure out what she really wants from a male.’

E—:‘It’s a total mess. You can go nuts trying to figure out what tack to take. She might go for it, she might not. Today’s woman’s a total crap-shoot. It’s like trying to figure out a Zen koan. Where what they want’s concerned, you pretty much have to just shut your eyes and leap.’

K—:‘I disagree.’

E—:‘I meant metaphorically.’

K—:‘I disagree that it’s impossible to determine what it is they really want.’

E—:‘I don’t think I said impossible .’

K—:‘Though I do agree that in today’s postfeminist era it’s unprecedentedly difficult and takes some serious deductive firepower and imagination.’

E—:‘I mean if it were really literally impossible then where would we be as a species?’

K—:‘And I do agree that you can’t necessarily go just by what they say they want.’

E—:‘Because are they only saying it because they think they’re supposed to?’

K—:‘My position is that actually most of the time you can figure out what they want, I mean almost logically deduce it, if you’re willing to make the effort to understand them and to understand the impossible situation they’re in.’

E—:‘But you can’t just go by what they say, is the big thing.’

K—:‘There I’d have to agree. What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they’ll say, it has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equals who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression.’

E—:‘That’s almost word for word what I’ve heard them say.’

K—:‘And it’s total horseshit.’

E—:‘They all sure have the empowerment-lingo down pat, that’s for sure.’

K—:‘You can easily see what horseshit it is as long as you remember to start by recognizing the impossible double bind we already discussed.’

E—:‘It’s not all that hard to see.’

Q.

K—:‘That she’s expected to be both sexually liberated and autonomous and assertive, and yet at the same time she’s still conscious of the old respectable-girl-versus-slut dichotomy, and knows that some girls still let themselves be used sexually out of a basic lack of self-respect, and she still recoils at the idea of ever being seen as this kind of pathetic roundheel sort of woman.’

E—:‘Plus remember the postfeminist girl now knows that the male sexual paradigm and the female’s are fundamentally different—’

K—:‘ Mars and Venus. ’

E—:‘Right, exactly, and she knows that as a woman she’s naturally programmed to be more highminded and long-term about sex and to be thinking more in relationship terms than just fucking terms, so if she just immediately breaks down and fucks you she’s on some level still getting taken advantage of, she thinks.’

K—:‘This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we’re all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.’

E—:‘While at the same time she’s still under this incredible sheer biological pressure to find a mate and settle down and nest and breed, for instance go read this thing The Rules and try to explain its popularity any other way.’

K—:‘The point being that women today are now expected to be responsible both to modernity and to history.’

E—:‘Not to mention sheer biology.’

K—:‘Biology’s already included in the range of what I mean by history .’

E—:‘So you’re using history more in a Foucaultvian sense.’

K—:‘I’m talking about history being a set of conscious intentional human responses to a whole range of forces of which biology and evolution are a part.’