Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

K——:‘That’s why so many of them are nuts.’

  E——:‘Out of their minds with internal stress.’

  K——:‘It’s not even really their fault.’

  E——:‘Who wouldn’t be nuts with that kind of mess of contradictions laid on them all the time in today’s media culture?’

  K——:‘The point being that this is what makes it so difficult, when for example you’re sexually interested in one, to figure out what she really wants from a male.’

  E——:‘It’s a total mess. You can go nuts trying to figure out what tack to take. She might go for it, she might not. Today’s woman’s a total crap-shoot. It’s like trying to figure out a Zen koan. Where what they want’s concerned, you pretty much have to just shut your eyes and leap.’

  K——:‘I disagree.’

  E——:‘I meant metaphorically.’

  K——:‘I disagree that it’s impossible to determine what it is they really want.’

  E——:‘I don’t think I said impossible.’

  K——:‘Though I do agree that in today’s postfeminist era it’s unprecedentedly difficult and takes some serious deductive firepower and imagination.’

  E——:‘I mean if it were really literally impossible then where would we be as a species?’

  K——:‘And I do agree that you can’t necessarily go just by what they say they want.’

  E——:‘Because are they only saying it because they think they’re supposed to?’

  K——:‘My position is that actually most of the time you can figure out what they want, I mean almost logically deduce it, if you’re willing to make the effort to understand them and to understand the impossible situation they’re in.’

  E——:‘But you can’t just go by what they say, is the big thing.’

  K——:‘There I’d have to agree. What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they’ll say, it has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equals who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression.’

  E——:‘That’s almost word for word what I’ve heard them say.’

  K——:‘And it’s total horseshit.’

  E——:‘They all sure have the empowerment-lingo down pat, that’s for sure.’

  K——:‘You can easily see what horseshit it is as long as you remember to start by recognizing the impossible double bind we already discussed.’

  E——:‘It’s not all that hard to see.’

  Q.

  K——:‘That she’s expected to be both sexually liberated and autonomous and assertive, and yet at the same time she’s still conscious of the old respectable-girl-versus-slut dichotomy, and knows that some girls still let themselves be used sexually out of a basic lack of self-respect, and she still recoils at the idea of ever being seen as this kind of pathetic roundheel sort of woman.’

  E——:‘Plus remember the postfeminist girl now knows that the male sexual paradigm and the female’s are fundamentally different—’

  K——:‘Mars and Venus.’

  E——:‘Right, exactly, and she knows that as a woman she’s naturally programmed to be more highminded and long-term about sex and to be thinking more in relationship terms than just fucking terms, so if she just immediately breaks down and fucks you she’s on some level still getting taken advantage of, she thinks.’

  K——:‘This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we’re all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.’

  E——:‘While at the same time she’s still under this incredible sheer biological pressure to find a mate and settle down and nest and breed, for instance go read this thing The Rules and try to explain its popularity any other way.’

  K——:‘The point being that women today are now expected to be responsible both to modernity and to history.’

  E——:‘Not to mention sheer biology.’

  K——:‘Biology’s already included in the range of what I mean by history.’

  E——:‘So you’re using history more in a Foucaultvian sense.’

  K——:‘I’m talking about history being a set of conscious intentional human responses to a whole range of forces of which biology and evolution are a part.’

  E——:‘The point is it’s an intolerable burden on women.’

  K——:‘The real point is that in fact they’re just logically incompatible, these two responsibilities.’

  E——:‘Even if modernity itself is a historical phenomenon, Foucault would say.’

  K——:‘I’m just pointing out that nobody can honor two logically incompatible sets of perceived responsibilities. This has nothing to do with history, this is pure logic.’

  E——:‘Personally, I blame the media.’

  K——:‘So what’s the solution.’

  E——:‘Schizophrenic media discourse exemplified by like for example Cosmo—on one hand be liberated, on the other make sure you get a husband.’

  K——:‘The solution is to realize that today’s women are in an impossible situation in terms of what their perceived sexual responsibilities are.’

  E——:‘I can bring home the bacon mm mm mm mm fry it up in a pan mm mm mm mm.’

  K——:‘And that, as such, they’re naturally going to want what any human being faced with two irresolvably conflicting sets of responsibilities is going to want. Meaning that what they’re really going to want is some way out of these responsibilities.’

  E——:‘An escape hatch.’

  K——:‘Psychologically speaking.’

  E——:‘A back door.’

  K——:‘Hence the timeless importance of: passion.’

  E——:‘They want to be both responsible and passionate.’

  K——:‘No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, over-whelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.’

  E——:‘In other words what they want from a guy is passion.’

  K——:‘They want to be swept off their feet. Blown away. Carried off on the wings of. The logical conflict between their responsibilities can’t be resolved, but their postmodern awareness of this conflict can be.’

  E——:‘Escaped. Denied.’

  K——:‘Meaning that, deep down, they want a man who’s going to be so overwhelmingly passionate and powerful that they’ll feel they have no choice, that this thing is bigger than both of them, that they can forget there’s even such a thing as postfeminist responsibilities.’

  E——:‘Deep down, they want to be irresponsible.’

  K——:‘I suppose in a way I agree, though I don’t think they can really be faulted for it, because I don’t think it’s conscious.’

  E——:‘It dwells as a Lacanian cry in the infantile unconscious, the lingo would say.’

  K——:‘I mean it’s understandable, isn’t it? The more these logically incompatible responsibilities are forced on today’s females, the stronger their unconscious desire for an overwhelmingly powerful, passionate male who can render the whole double bind irrelevant by so totally over-whelming them with passion that they can allow themselves to believe they couldn’t help it, that the sex wasn’t a matter of conscious choice that they can be held responsible for, that ultimately if anyone was responsible it was the male.’

  E——: ‘Which explains why the bigger the so-called feminist, the more she’ll hang on you and follow you around after you sleep with her.’

  K——:‘I’m not sure I’d go along with that.’

  E——:‘But it
follows that the bigger the feminist, the more grateful and dependent she’s going to be after you’ve ridden in on your white charger and relieved her of responsibility.’

  K——:‘What I disagree with is the so-called. I don’t believe that today’s feminists are being consciously insincere in all their talk about autonomy. Just as I don’t believe they’re strictly to blame for the terrible bind they’ve found themselves in. Though deep down I suppose I do have to agree that women are historically ill-equipped for taking genuine responsibility for themselves.’

  Q.

  E——:‘I don’t suppose either of you saw where the Little Wranglers’ room was in this place.’

  K——:‘I don’t mean that in any kind of just-another-Neanderthal-male-grad-student-putting-down-women-because-he’s-too-insecure-to-countenance-their-sexual-subjectivity way. And I’d go to the wall to defend them against scorn or culpability for a situation that is clearly not their fault.’

  E——:‘Because it’s getting to be time to answer nature’s page if you know what I mean.’

  K——:‘I mean, even simply looking at the evolutionary aspect, you have to agree that a certain lack of autonomy-slash-responsibility was an obvious genetic advantage as far as primitive human females went, since a weak sense of autonomy would drive a primitive female toward a primitive male to provide food and protection.’

  E——:‘While your more autonomous, butch-type female would be out hunting on her own, actually competing with the males for food.’

  K——:‘But the point is that it was the less self-sufficient less autonomous females who found mates and bred.’

  E——:‘And raised offspring.’

  K——:‘And thus perpetuated the species.’

  E——:‘Natural selection favored the ones who found mates instead of going out hunting. I mean, how many cave-paintings of female hunters do you ever see?’

  K——:‘Historically, we should probably note that once the quote-unquote weak female has mated and bred, she shows an often spectacular sense of responsibility where her offspring are concerned. It’s not that females have no capacity for responsibility. That’s not what I’m talking about.’

  E——:‘They do make great moms.’

  K——:‘What we’re talking about here is single adult preprimipara females, their genetic-slash-historical capacity for autonomy, for as it were self-responsibility, in their dealings with males.’

  E——:‘Evolution has bred it out of them. Look at the magazines. Look at romance novels.’

  K——:‘What today’s woman wants, in short, is a male with both the passionate sensitivity and the deductive firepower to discern that all her pronouncements about autonomy are actually desperate cries in the wilderness of the double bind.’

  E——:‘They all want it. They just can’t say it.’

  K——:‘Putting you, today’s interested male, in the paradoxical role of almost their therapist or priest.’

  E——:‘They want absolution.’

  K——:‘When they say “I am my own person,” “I do not need a man,” “I am responsible for my own sexuality,” they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.’

  E——:‘They want to be rescued.’

  K——:‘They want you on one level to wholeheartedly agree and respect what they’re saying and on another, deeper level to recognize that it’s total horseshit and to gallop in on your white charger and overwhelm them with passion, just as males have been doing since time immemorial.’

  E——: ‘That’s why you can’t take what they say at face value or it’ll drive you nuts.’

  K——:‘Basically it’s all still an elaborate semiotic code, with the new postmodern semions of autonomy and responsibility replacing the old premodern semions of chivalry and courtship.’

  E——:‘I really do have to see a man about a prancing pony.’

  K——:‘The only way not to get lost in the code is to approach the whole issue logically. What is she really saying?’

  E——:‘No doesn’t mean yes, but it doesn’t mean no, either.’

  K——:‘I mean, the capacity for logic is what distinguished us from animals to begin with.’

  E——:‘Which, no offense, but logic’s not exactly a woman’s strong suit.’

  K——:‘Although if the whole sexual situation is illogical, it hardly makes sense to blame today’s woman for being weak on logic or for giving off a constant barrage of paradoxical signals.’

  E——:‘In other words, they’re not responsible for not being responsible, K——’s saying.’

  K——:‘I’m saying it’s tricky and difficult but that if you use your head it’s not impossible.’

  E——:‘Because think about it: if it was really impossible where would the whole species be?’

  K——:‘Life always finds a way.’

  TRI-STAN: I SOLD SISSEE NAR TO ECKO

  The fuzzy Hensonian epiclete Ovid the Obtuse, syndicated chronicler of trans-human entertainment exchange in low-cost organs across the land, mythologizes the origins of the ghostly double that always shadows human figures on UHF broadcast bands thus:

  There moved & shook, Before Cable, a wise & clever programming executive named Agon M. Nar. This Agon M. Nar was revered throughout medieval California’s fluorescent basin for the clever wisdom & cojones with which he presided over Recombinant Programming for the Telephemus Studios division of Tri-Stan Entertainment Unltd. Agon M. Nar’s programming archē was the metastasis of originality. He could shuffle & recombine proven entertainment formulae that allowed the muse of Familiarity to appear cross-dressed as Innovation. Agon M. Nar was also a devoted family man. & so it came to pass that, as his Brady Bunch & All in the Family flourished & begat Family Ties & Diff’rent Strokes & Gimme a Break & Who’s the Boss?, from whose brows, hydra-like, sprang Webster & Mr. Belvedere & Growing Pains & Married…With Children & Life Goes On & the mythic Cosby, all with ads infinitum, Agon M. Nar in private family life did beget three semi-independent vehicles, daughters, maidens, Leigh & Coleptic & Sissee, who did then grow & thrive like kudzu among the fluorescent basin’s palms & malls & beaches & temples.

  So favored was Agon M. Nar, industry legend had it, by company CEOs Stanley, Stanley & Stanley, as well as by Stasis, God of Passive Reception himself, & too so blest with savvy, that by the time his three lovely maidens—whom he now saw & adored every third weekend—had undergone their first Surgical Enhancements, Agon M. Nar had actually vanquished the esurient, heavy-hitting & high-profile Reggie Ecko of Venice as Recombinant Head of all Tri-Stan, R. Ecko of V. falling then gently back to the basin’s pastel earth, deposed & just royally pissed, under a parachute’s aegis of golden silk.

  & Agon M. Nar administered Tri-Stan Entertainment’s affairs wisely & cleverly indeed; &, as is recorded, recombinations of derivations of ripoffs of spin-offs of pale imitations came to dominate & soothe the formerly chaotic MHz, Before Cable.

  & while recombination as ēthos metastasized, soothed, & remunerated across the pink-orange landscape of medieval CA, Agon M. Nar’s unattested daughters blossomed into nymphetitude. Ever farsighted, Agon M. Nar wisely provided for monthly tribute to the fluorescent basin’s God of Surgical Enhancement, the spherically crispate & sartorially retrograde but plasticly facile Herm (‘Afro’) Deight MD, he of the plaid bellbottoms & lavender smock; & H.(‘A.’)D.MD, G. of S.E., well pleased at such tribute, fashioned Agon M. Nar’s daughters into nymphets far, far lovelier than the stony vicissitudes of Nature would have provided solo. Nature was a bit honked off over this, but she had more than enough on her plate in medieval CA already. Anyway, Leigh & Coleptic Nar eventually blossomed into USC cheerleaders, post-vestal attendants at the Saturday temple of the padded gods Ra & Sisboomba; on their subsequent careers Ovid the Obtuse is mute.

  But it was Agon M. Nar’s youngest daughter, his Baby, his Love-Dumpling, his Little Princess—viz. Sissee, the Nar family’s lone aspiring thespian, haunt
er of casting calls for commercials & daytime serials—who did become Herm (‘Afro’) Deight the Enhancement technēcian’s favorite & Personal Project; & after much non-HMO tribute, plus rituals & procedures so grisly as to compel lyric restraint, the eventually nearly 100%-Enhanced Sissee Nar so like totally surpassed her acrobatic sisters & all the fluorescent basin’s other maidens that she seemed, according to Varietae, ‘…a very goddess consorting with mortals.’

  & she consorted a lot. For as word of her trans-human charms spread throughout the basins & ranges & interior wastes of medieval CA, bronzed men with cleft chins & rigid hair from as far away as the Land of Huge Red Pines journeyed in loud & extraordinarily phallic chariots to gaze upon Sissee Nar’s spandextral form with wonder & glandular excitement, & to consort. The tragic historian Dirk of Fresno records that so vertiginously protrusive was Sissee Nar’s bust that she needed aid to recline, so juttingly sepulchral her cheekbones that she cast predatory shadows & had to do doorways in profile, & so perfectly otherworldly her teeth & tan that the BC demiurges Carie & Erythema, mortally affronted & blasphemed, entered an appeal for aesthetic justice (specific appeal: for a nasty attack of comedones & gingivitic recession) to Stasis—i.e. yes the Stasis, Overlord of San Fernandus, Board-Chair ex off of Tri-Stan’s parent, the Sturm & Drang Family of Exceptionally Fine Companies; Stasis as in summum solo, Olympic Overseer, God of Passive Reception & all-around Big Mythopoeic Cheese. Carie & Erythema’s case never even made it onto the Olympian docket, though; for Stasis, G. of P.R., had himself personally gazed down upon & admired Ms. Sissee Nar, & from his home-entertainment module kept distant video tabs on the riveting maiden at all times via the state-of-the-art hand-held technai of his foam-winged factota, Nike & Fila (who split shifts).

  It’s right around here that Ovid the O. tone-shifts to Lament. For alas, the God Stasis’s immortal S.O., the basin’s Queen Goddess, Codependae, was seriously ill pleased that Stasis spent more quality time admiring Sissee Nar’s camcorded image from the vantage of his module’s exercycle than he spent even bothering to deny his infatuation with the much-Enhanced maiden to Codep. over the Olympian couple’s oat-intensive breakfast. Stasis’s denial was Codependae’s ambrosia, & she found its absence inappropriate & irksome in the extremus. & plus then when she came out of the sauna & found the Reception-God on his cellular pricing swan-costume rentals—well, this was understandably impossible to detach from; & Codependae vowed retaliation against this mortal & undulant strumpet before her entire Support Group. The horn-mad Queen began teleconferencing with the affronted demiurges Carie & Erythema, plus had her administrative assistant contact Nature’s administrative assistant & set up a brunch meeting; & Codep. basically got all these transmortals, their self-esteem compromised by Sissee Nar’s Enhanced & Passively Received charms, to declare a covert action against Sissee & her much-favored father, Agon M. Nar of Tri-Stan Unltd. Having three divinities plus Nature all honked off at you at once is just not good karma at all, but mortally naive Sissee & workaholic Agon M. ignored sudden sharp increases in their insurance premia & went about their business of moving & shaking & recombining & undergoing Enhancement & auditioning & consorting & avoiding anything in the way of autoreflection more or less as usual. I.e. they were blithe.