“the joke is that it’s sex work”
Hi all, just a quick rant about this one running gag I always see in like films or books.
Read Slaughterhouse V by Kurt Vonnegut a while back, just because he’s an american author people absolutely rave about, particularly because of the humour and ironic tone he uses to criticize political attitudes during WW2. And that’s all swell with me like great i align A LOT act with his anti-war sentiments. But there’s bits in the book where it’s really a further jab at how crude humans can be but rubs me the wrong way.
example – the first camera created was used to take a picture of a woman doing something unmentionable with a horse.
when the protagonist was kidnapped by the alien race and put into a human zoo, they got him a mate – a porn star named montana something. I think this was poking fun at like a scenario “if aliens had to understand human history” they’d think the human male sexuality was a porn star. But this is my interpretation – the book mentioned nothing else about the character besides her profession and that’s “funny” that he’s trapped in a zoo but with a sex worker to mate with. There is a meta joke in there somewhere…but again it goes past a lot of readers heads once they see porn star.
then there’s his story “welcome to the monkey house” which felt like it would’ve been published with a bunch of those Roald Dahl smut fiction in playboy and narrative elements were way too voyeuristic for it to be read as a serious critique. It was sir’s barely disguised fetish more like.
I’m so sick of having to confront these topics and being reminded that i’m nothing more than a walking hole for a lot of these men who are the some of the top literary stars of their times, whose works are still celebrated and have a lot of merit i agree. It still pisses me tf off tho.
by a_moxie_killin
3 Comments
Vonnegut had a big issue writing women and it’s one he owned up to later in his life, IIRC. A lot of the writers in the 50s-60s were even worse than the ones that came before because now you could be explicit about your weird women views.
That said why did you write “afab” instead of women, as if trans women don’t know being objectified or sex work or something?
As Kilgore Trout once wrote, in the pages of a particularly smutty magazine, “Sarcastic prose rides on a wave of subtext.”
That is to say you’ve got to remember Vonnegut loves to heap phoney veneration on the topics he critiques, because he’s as often as not thumbing his nose at what the characters extol (including the character of the narrative voice).
That’s not to say he’s not a patriarchal product of his times, because he is, and his understanding of women is almost always projected through male gaze. Sometimes that’s him echoing the culture’s misogyny, sometimes that’s him criticizing the culture’s misogyny, and sometimes that’s him just being a bit of a misogynist. I mean, that’s the twentieth century for you.
So it goes.
Also afab and as a kid I read so much Henry Miller and Wm Burroughs and just fully dissociated from who I was while reading. Such a mindfuck!