Kill Me Maybe

[seabeyond]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/06/girls_and_sex_once_more_looking_for_mr_goodbar_.html?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews


Your level of enjoyment, when it comes to Judith Rossner’s 1975 best-seller Looking for Mr. Goodbar, may very well depend on whether you’re willing to read an entire book for the sake of being sarcastic. I bought it from a used bookstore when I was in my mid-20s. I had heard that it was about a desperate single woman in New York. I was young; I was hip; I was a woman in New York. I bought the book as a defiant feminist gesture, a statement on all I would never be.

Then I read it. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a book about misery—a claustrophobic, paranoid misery that seeps into you. It made me feel spooked by my own psyche, like a campfire tale that reveals the Hook Hand Killer was never found because he’s … right … here!

But before we get there, let us pause, and appreciate the charm of the jacket copy that pulled me in, and the specific female despair it delineates: “Judith Rossner writes with haunting intensity of the temptations and problems of a young woman of today alone in a big city where there are opportunities for a different kind of life—a life that relieves the boredom of work or dispels the chill of solitude, a life”—wait for it—“where you can have sex with strangers.”

The plot of Goodbar is probably familiar to many readers, either from the book itself or from its 1977 film adaptation. A young woman named Theresa Dunn lives a double life. By day, she’s a clean-living schoolteacher, in a serious relationship with a kind but unexciting lawyer named James. By night, she frequents singles bars, where she wantonly tempts men into bed, with working-class sexual dynamo Tony her most common hook-up. A grisly fate, of course, awaits, as we’ve known from the beginning. Theresa rejects Tony for slapping her, rejects James for proposing to her, then takes home a drifter, who bashes her head in and rapes her corpse. Pleasant dreams!

______________________

interesting read. the article was too long and too many interesting paragraphs, connected to the whole, i couldnt go around just pulling out paragraphs. so, i took just the first four paragraphs.

[redqueen]

1. Ugggggggggh

The fact that Goodbar still haunts us—it’s been used as an argument against everything from 50 Shades of Grey to Craigslist—may point to a deeper fear than we’re willing to admit. Maybe what scares us isn’t that girls are putting themselves in danger. Maybe what scares us is simply the fact that they’re putting themselves out in the world at all.

"Girls"? Really?

And no, jackass, what scares me isn't that women are doing whatever they like. What scares me is that so many people are still SO very comfortable putting all of this focus on these women, and what they're doing, and not why we as a society tolerate the conflation of sex with violence, the widespread idea that sexism and misogyny are somehow more tolerable than any other kind of bigotry, or anything else that also enables and maintains the rape culture we live in.

And Sady refers to Bruni as "moaning" in his oh so much more worthy-of-reading editorial. lulz

[BlueIris]

2. There's one iconic work I haven't read yet.

I think I would put it on my list next to The Female Eunuch, The Weaker Vessel and The Second Sex.

Or maybe not. This might be one I could skip.