Bad Behavior: Stories

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Other characters whose perspectives are featured include Paul (Ginger's husband), Silvia (Velvet's mother), Dante (Velvet's younger brother), and Beverly (a horse trainer). There she meets Veronica—an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal “office kit” and a plaque that reads “Still Anal After All These Years. In one early story, “A Romantic Weekend,” two lovers with high hopes for an adulterous weekend witness their “seductive puffball cloud deflated with a flaccid hiss, leaving two drunken, bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. For her, both the feminists and the anti-feminists of the 1990s focused too narrowly on codifying sexual “rules” without paying attention to personal responsibility and self-awareness.

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

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. There were a few moments that I found too uncomfortable and below the belt, and it might have helped being a tad longer to give more of a backstory to Veronica, who still felt like a bit of an enigma to me, but some of Gaitskill's sentences were just like, wow. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012, 2020), and The O. She characterized the film as "the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice)," but observed that the "bottom line is that if [a film adaptation is] made you get some money and exposure, and people can make up their minds from there. She wants to make it clear she hasn’t written a book that blames women for acts of aggression committed against them, or excuses the men who have committed them – rather she’s insisting on a level of nuance that she believes is often elided from these narratives.In the movie, Maggie Gyllenhall plays an awkward and self-harming young woman, who goes to work for an attorney who begins to sexually subjugate her. I only had a flip phone then, and I would sometimes read manuscripts, but I would also just look out the window, and it was so calming and connecting. This, again, goes against the dominant strain of contemporary thought: that consent is active not passive; saying “yes” is the only invitation to sex. For a long time, anyone interested in more forthright declarations of Gaitskill’s opinions needed to hunt them down.

Why is Bad Behavior So Good? ‹ Literary Hub Why is Bad Behavior So Good? ‹ Literary Hub

It ends with Velvet, now 13, winning her first equestrian competition and then immediately swearing off horseback riding forever at the behest of her abusive mother. Gaitskill suggested that rules were quite often disempowering: If you’re told to follow a rule that doesn’t resonate with you (“Don’t sleep with someone on the first date”) or doesn’t seem to fit a particular situation (“Never objectify a woman”), then you can’t develop the kind of personal responsibility that enables you to better take charge of your life. As the story goes on, we learn that Margot cannot unsee this humanity even as Quin’s accusers grow in number. All of which look into the lives of women looking for connection, sexual excitement, or obsession in various formats. Instead, Gaitskill wants us to better understand what motivates behavior—bad and good—and why people hurt each other in spite of rules and regulations.

The path she proposes in the essay is a more challenging one, but, she insists, it also has more potential to make lasting change. Dealing with my feelings and what had caused them, rather than expecting the outside world to assuage them,” was, for her, a key source of protection: The best means of self-defense required self-knowledge.