Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 9, 1994 TAG: 9403090123
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
First, there was what the Hollins writer-in-residence calls "that horrible article."
It was a hip-lipped piece in the February Esquire that branded her and several other young women authors as what the male magazine writer called "do me" feminists.
"I think he was trying to assure his readers that [feminists] are cute, they are friendly and they really like sex. We all sound kind of weird and trivial."
In the piece, "Backlash" author Susan Faludi accuses Gaitskill of creating female characters who come alive only when seeking male abuse. Somebody also called Gaitskill a "babe" feminist recently, which to her is yet another slick misstatement of who she is and what she thinks.
She says she doesn't fall neatly among either the old-guard feminists or the new ones spitting irreverently at them. "I have a lot of opinions. In some areas I'm more on the Camille Paglia side. On some others, I'm more on the traditional side."
Apart from the Esquire flap, Gaitskill took her own distinctive stand on sexual politics in another magazine this month. Her essay, "On Not Being a Victim: Sex, Rape, and the Trouble with Following Rules," was the lead piece in Harper's.
Braced by candid accounts of her sexual misadventures, a rape when she was 18 and an earlier incident when she went along with unwanted intercourse, Gaitskill takes on the rules-and-regulations, politically correct, "just say no" approach to social behavior.
"When I was growing up in the 1960s," she wrote, "I was taught by the adult world that good girls never had sex and bad girls did. This rule had clarity going for it but little else; as it was presented to me, it allowed no room for what I actually might feel, what I might want or not want. Within the confines of this rule, I didn't count for much, and I quite vigorously rejected it."
No one explained why the no-sex rule might be good for her, except that she'd be a "nice" girl and avoid social embarrassment; nor did anyone consider her feelings on the whole business. She was a healthy young woman, naturally drawn to sex. Her friends were telling her the more sex the merrier. She chose their code instead.
Still, she was following external rules, not her own. Alone with a man at 16, a man who gently led her into unwilling sex while she was high on acid, Gaitskill relented so as not to hurt his feelings.
"Since I had been taught only how to follow rules that were somehow more important than I was, I didn't know what to do in a situation where no rules obtained and that required me to speak up on my own behalf. I had never been taught that my behalf mattered."
An older woman said later that Gaitskill had raped herself. She said that rang true.
Surprisingly, Gaitskill found the ambiguous rape with that man more emotionally painful than the "real" one later with the other guy.
She explains in Harper's: "Frankly, I've been scarred more by experiences I had on the playground in elementary school. I realize that the observation may seem bizarre, but for me the rape was a clearly defined act, perpetrated upon me by a crazy [expletive] whom I didn't know or trust; it had nothing to do with me or who I was, and so, when it was over, it was relatively easy to dismiss."
She argues that responsibility and social conduct need to be better taught: "To teach a boy that rape is `bad' is not as effective as making him see that rape is a violation of his own masculine dignity as well as a violation of the raped woman."
The rest of the essay is an appeal for compassion: for men and women confused by sex roles, for young women scorned by other feminists for trusting men they shouldn't, and for people who seek aid from self-help books and 12-step programs some writers have derided.
Gaitskill urges respect for other people's psychological pain. People experience things differently. They mature emotionally at varying rates. "If thousands of Americans say that they are in psychic pain," she wrote, "I would not be so quick to write them off as self-indulgent fools."
Now she waits at Hollins for the feedback. She expects a bag of mail from Harper's. She wonders if people understood what she meant. She wishes she'd explained a few things more fully. She's amused that Harper's wouldn't let her use the word "horny."
"They didn't want to compromise Harper's dignity was what they said."
She worries her next essay will lack the depth of this one. She thought about this essay for years. It took her five weeks to write it.
And she's annoyed by the Esquire article. She says it's a commentary piece masquerading as honest journalism. In one of the pictures that ran with it, a young feminist is wearing a low-cut, off-the-shoulder top and lying in the back of a pickup truck.
Observing that some women in the piece didn't rate a picture, Gaitskill said with a "hmmph," "I guess they didn't think they were pretty enough." She must have won the beauty contest. Her picture is the only one that ran full-page.
She's quoted as saying her fictional women are "frail outside but tough as painted nails underneath and wanting to do all these perverted horny things, only the men are too stupid and clumsy to do it with them. I'm not condoning disrespect for women, but the pleasure of sexual violence is not something only men like."
"I didn't mean violence is fun," she says.
She was born in Lexington, Ky., and grew up outside Detroit. She ran away from home at 15, then again at 16.
She'd already been through a lot by 20. She spent two months in a mental hospital. She skipped most of high school and got a GED before going to college.
"I put myself through school. I lived hand-to-mouth most of the time. I've always taken care of myself."
She moved to New York. She worked in a bookstore, as a legal proofreader, a secretary and an artist's nude model.
Working those low-rent jobs, she had plenty of time to check out people, like "a fly on the wall." Her characters work those kinds of jobs, too, and mostly in Manhattan.
She likes describing faces and bodies. Her characters' knees are pinched, their shoulders hunched or cramped. She reads body language into parts of the physique where most writers don't look.
Animal-like faces, movements and thoughts pulsate on her pages. The reader wanders among the strange wonderings of her characters as they peruse each other and fantasize in a 24-hour, X-rated C-SPAN of the mind.
Her stories are edgy. People's skins are sticky. They gnaw their food. Garbage flaps on city street corners. Flowers and weeds are "blameless." Gaitskill nails miserable emotions, like one character's "mosquito-bite feeling of loss."
She got a typical first-book advance, $5,000, for her 1988 short story collection, "Bad Behavior." Then the book brought big foreign and paperback sales.
She became a recognized writer. "Suddenly," she says, "the world was in my face. I had to leave New York. It drove me nuts."
She lives in San Francisco now and is 39. She's trying to learn how to be a full-time writer without the urgency she once had as a part-time one, when her writing was packed in the few hours between work and sleep. She's irritated with herself for not making more progress on some new short stories.
She'd been shopping around for a writing residency. She says she needed the money. Writer Madison Smartt Bell had been through Hollins' creative writing master's program and suggested she come here. She started the one-semester job early in February.
She's sitting in on Hollins writing workshops and critiquing students' fiction. She offered to send one's short story to her agent.
Saturday, she'll read from her work at Hollins' annual literary festival. Her reading is at 2 p.m.
Gaitskill's won considerable literary credits - heady reviews of her "Bad Behavior," a good reception for her 1991 novel "Two Girls, Fat and Thin," a story in last year's edition of "Best American Short Stories" and other fiction recently in Esquire, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.
Now she's braced for another kind of recognizability. Before, she only marched her characters into public view. The Harper's essay is about herself.
She's set to be interviewed on Charlie Rose's popular show on public TV in New York. (WBRA-TV in Roanoke begins broadcasting that show next month.) A Texas radio station wants to interview her.
And as with her characters, she's keeping a watch on her feelings. "If you try to suppress the emotional, it's going to come up and bite you in the ass so you can't sit down for a week."
Hollins College Literary Festival, Saturday, 9:30 a.m. With Mary Gaitskill, Henry Taylor and Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn. 362-6317.
by CNB