“The Trouble With Following the Rules” is probably the best articulation of what, I think, women my age are so unhappy about: in the old sexual regime, the rule was for women to have as little sex as possible, and now the rule is to have as much sex as possible. However, after reading Gaitskill’s essays, it seems they’re not opposed to sex, but rather to what Gaitskill calls fornication. Lately, outlets including the New York Timeshave been chattering about the idiotically termed “sex negativity”, supposedly in vogue among young women. It is a “primitive attempt” to “give ballast to the most desperate human confusion”. In a remarkable piece on reading the Bible (“A Lot of Exploding Heads: On Reading the Book of Revelation”), she defines fornication not simply as sex outside of marriage, but as “sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one’s self or one’s partner, let alone any sense of real playfulness”. Gaitskill isn’t telling women to have lower standards for sex in a sense, she’s telling them to have higher standards. By the end of the essay, she takes responsibility for pretending to consent, tripping in that apartment decades earlier, with that man who was poor and black and “high on acid and misunderstanding, just as I was”. And any decent, kind sex won’t come from rigid rules it will come from, as she writes, “the kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility”. In Gaitskill’s vision, sexual partners have awkward, often painful, negotiations to make, often in the dark, often in a rush, often in confusion. I didn’t mention that we became lovers for the next two years.” That first draft made the story simpler, but the messy version is braver and more true. In a move reminiscent of Amy Hempel’s The Harvest, Gaitskill writes: “In the original version of this essay I didn’t mention that when I woke up the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and that when he called me I invited him over for dinner again. Suggested reading The sexual revolution killed feminism Then, she writes about when a casual friend and her get drunk and he became aggressive and seemed almost to force her into sex. In a stunning turn, she says that when she was “raped for real” by an attacker who threatened to kill her, she got over it pretty quickly. It begins with Gaitskill’s description of her date rape as a sixteen-year-old girl dropping acid with strangers in Detroit, before questioning whether it was really rape. She brings the same remarkable mixture of clear thought and startling vulnerability to questions of sexual consent: her essay “The Trouble With Following the Rules” is, for me, just about the best analysis of date rape ever written. And her goal isn’t to condemn - not to condemn Mailer or Nabokov or her assaulters or the pretentious boyfriend obsessed with The Talking Heads: her goal is to complicate. But her “story”, like everyone else’s, is up for debate, and she doesn’t make herself a martyr or a hero. Wow!Īnyone rushing to dismiss Gaitskill as unempathetic or cold would be hard-pressed: she inserts herself into these questions with unflinching bravery, and she knows suffering herself. Twelve pages into an essay defending Lolita as a book about love, about how lovers strive for heaven and dwell in hell, she starts talking about how she was molested at five - and says she felt empathy for the man that she was even aroused. But here, Gaitskill is in a class of her own: braver, ballsier-just smarter. That maturity - sometimes painful, often bleak - can prove unpopular, especially when it comes to sex. Gaitskill serves as the person with the little hammer, but she doesn’t just remind us of unhappiness: beyond that, her job is to remind us how complicated living is, how little we know, how much we have left to do. That title comes from her essay - included in both volumes - about teaching Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, with its famous speech: “At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall - illness, poverty, loss - and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now.” Most of the essays in Oppositions are reprised from her 2017 collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. More from this author The Velvet Underground had to die