ESSAY

By Pico Iyer

Everyone knows, more than they would like perhaps, about the nature, the publishing history and the unspeakable horrors of Bret Easton Ellis' new novel, American Psycho. However broadly it seeks to indict, in indelible, blood-red ink, the excesses and depravities of the degenerate '80s, the book has certainly raised a threshold of taste, or psychic pain, much higher than most readers would like (much as the smash movie The Silence of the Lambs exposes even toddlers to a level of psychological violence that would have been unthinkable -- or at least less powerful -- some years ago). A protagonist who eats, tortures and dismembers victims is clearly assaulting all that we hold sacred. And it is painfully easy to see the damage such a book can do to the way in which men see, and therefore treat, women.

But what of the way the book treats men, and affects our notion of them? Insofar as Ellis has deliberately created a monstrous deformity, it is nonetheless striking that the monster is male, and preys mostly on women; and insofar as he intends a closer identification with his creation, the author himself is implicated in the guilt. In either case, the culprit is a male, and the novel is unlikely to endear the unfairer sex to a nation that is already all too conscious of the harm men can do.

Ellis' plot line is, of course, true to criminal statistics, and to our intuitive sense that terrible physical violence is all too often perpetrated by men on women. But it is very much to be hoped that the outrage would be no less if Ellis' monster had been a woman, or more of its victims men (the offense, in other words, lies not in the object of the sentences but in the sentences themselves).

Consider, for example, another just published novel, by another highly touted young writer, which, if it gets less exposure than Ellis', will probably win more praise: Two Girls, Fat and Thin, by Mary Gaitskill. And consider for a moment how the novel looks at men. The first of the eponymous girls is repeatedly -- and graphically -- abused sexually by her father (who, when not molesting her, pushes her down the stairs and calls her "an argument for abortion"); the other girl is abused, also graphically, at the age of five by a male friend of her father's. The boys at the local high school are "murderously aggressive" and have "monstrous voices"; the nicest of them is blessed with "a morbidly cruel personality" and "seemed happiest when torturing small animals by himself."

The thin girl's first lover is a boy with "cruel lips" who plays a rapist in the school play and more or less carries that role over to real life; her most attractive lover is "an abusive mental case" whose eyes "glitter with the adrenal malice of a sex criminal." Everywhere one looks there are repulsive men, "fat creatures mostly, baked pink and bearded, their self- satisfaction and arrogance expressed in their wide, saggy-bottomed hips." Meanwhile, in the background, we see a constant procession of "abusive lovers," porn collectors and groping, "gloating" lechers. The only faintly appealing male in 304 pages -- his name is Knight -- ran away from home "to escape an alcoholic father" and gently betrays his fiance. Small wonder, then, that at novel's end, one girl concludes that most men are "really awful" and the other rails against "the chemical and hormonal forces that goad that sex to kill, rape and commit crimes of horrific sadism." The men in Gaitskill's first book are, if anything, even worse.

All this is fair enough, perhaps, and true to the way life may seem to many contemporary young women. It could be said that women do not fare much better in Gaitskill's world, and that this view of men reflects in part the distorted vision of two neurotic girls (though if so, Gaitskill suggests, that is because of the ill treatment they have suffered at the hands of men). It could even be argued that this is how women apprehend a world largely fashioned by the likes of Bret Easton Ellis. Yet to say this is to draw dangerously close to the case for American Psycho: by revealing disgusting attitudes, it reveals its disgust for such attitudes. And just imagine, for a moment, that the pronouns were reversed, and that every woman in a long and serious novel was treated as oppressive: Would there not be an uproar? And is Gaitskill's form of emotional violence really much better than the more viscerally appalling kind?

None of this, of course, is to deny or defend the abuse of women in much male fiction; nor is it to make the perverse point that a man mistreating women is simply giving a bad name to men. It is, rather, to suggest that sometimes, for whatever reasons, the violence flows in the other direction too, and in ways no less insidious for being less conspicuous. Meryl Streep and others have rightly complained that all the best roles in movies go to men; but a medium that takes Schwarzenegger and Stallone as its heroes is not being so kind to men either. The two hottest box-office movies not so long ago -- The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy -- both portrayed men as psychopaths and bullies taking out their sicknesses on plucky, intelligent women; such critical favorites as GoodFellas and the Godfather trilogy merely replace monsters with mobsters. If Hollywood still too often treats women as bimbos and hookers, it is apt to see men as homicidal maniacs; the sad truth of it may be that all of us -- in pop culture's imagination -- are diminished as often as uplifted.

Again, this is not to exonerate Ellis; it is only to say that the interaction of the sexes, like everything else, can only be demeaned if it is caricatured as a contest of black against white. And in our justifiable sensitivity to certain kinds of violence, we may blind ourselves to others. As it is, students are being taught in school that "patriarchal" is the worst kind of insult, and misogynists must be sought out everywhere. But what is the term for misogyny in reverse? It sometimes seems that we would rectify a long history of violence against women by simply engaging in violence against everyone: equal-opportunity abuse. And that we would seek to replace one kind of double standard with another. Might it not be better to try to raise our vision of both parties?