Stop Writing Men as Monsters

Coming from a good writer, a book of gratuitous and loathsome badness demands an explanation. The Stalker by Paula Bomer, is such a book. Bomer is best known for 2014’s Inside Madeline, an edgy, excellent collection of short stories on female embodiment that resonated with the third-wave feminists of my generation. Now she’s back with her buzziest title since, The Stalker, a book which aims to satirize shitty men, but instead is unwittingly revealing of a failed paradigm: feminism’s totalizing hatred of men doesn’t challenge misogyny — it mirrors it, creating a new type of totalizing female self-hatred. We might wish that the one side could be all-bad, and the other all-good, but men and women are tied together more tightly than that, as this book proves. As a novel, it is fatally flawed, and I don’t recommend it, but as a curio object it’s worth examining.