notes.husk.org/likes images.

Fette Sans, Untitled, 2012.

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Female writers have always been criticised for any account of their sex and romantic lives. Mary McCarthy published a story in 1941 called “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit” about a young woman – clearly her – who slept with a middle-aged businessman on a train and woke up realizing he looked “like a young pig”. The men were all scandalised! Saul Bellow called the piece “bullshit”, and Alfred Kazin condemned her “contempt for men.” Just last year, a 21-year-old writer named Marie Calloway blogged about a sexual encounter engineered with an older “n+1” type guy – in graphic detail. She wrote, in a very deliberate, moment-by-moment way, about how it felt, using the phone on her camera to record his cum on her face.

McCarthy wrote in the clean modernist style of her time. Calloway is channeling the rambling blah-blah-blah Tao Lin style of our time. Either way, the fear and loathing of what women can say about men in that most “intimate” state is still there. We’re supposed to be silent witnesses. Though whether sex is really the most intimate thing about anyone is something we could debate.

Chris Kraus interviewed by Mara Goldwyn for Sleek Magazine, November 2012.