“Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.”
There’s coruscating irony in Gaitskill’s title, which dawns on the reader as her two characters indulge in a pre-arranged union of consensual sexual violence. Roles and power, however, soon shift, their weekend of sado-masochism rapidly unravelling into discomforting incompatibility. It’s an uncomfortable read at times, with Gaitskill holding a mirror to the reader, forcing us to squirm as we contemplate what it means to offer and take pleasure from sexual encounters when desires are misaligned.
First published in Bad Behavior, Simon & Schuster, 1998; collected in The Granta Book of the American Short Story, Granta Books, 2007
A Personal Anthology 