Aftermath

It’s rained every day, it seems like, for weeks now in New York City. I keep waking up and there are wisps of sun and I go to work and then it starts raining and it’s like why did I bother washing my hair? The way I feel anyway is like that Carole King song where she keeps saying “It’s raining in my heart… It might as well rain until September.”

The Paris Review just ran an essay by Tony Tulathimutte called “The Rejection Plot.” The rejection plot, according to Tulathimutte, is the opposite of the romance plot. It is a negative storyline, entirely phantom self-soothing. If you cannot process rejection, it generates a kind of phantom limb, an alternate storyline in which things went your way. Like any other kind of absence, it turns the absent person into something like a theoretical concept, a blank cipher onto which you can project a dreamier future. It’s the aftermath of crushing. “When wishful thinking becomes confused with reality,” writes Tulathimutte, “the real person vanishes, as does the entire world around that person. The thing you’ve been denied is always perfect. In ‘To a Magazine,’ Mary Ruefle writes, ‘the rejected know another knowledge—that if they were not rejected, heaven would descend upon the earth in earthly dreams […] The rejected know if they were nonrejected a clear cerulean blue would be the result, an endless love ever dissolving in more endless love.’”

At its best, this kind of stubborn delusion is private mourning, mostly sad for the deluded. Externalized, it’s weird, creepy, demanding, the refusal or inability to take a hint. I had a friend once who refused to take a hint. Even after she had ostensibly moved on, she clung to scraps of hope (by her own description). More than that, she was desperate for her version of reality to be validated. It must be because of sexual repression or other extenuating circumstances that her love was not reciprocated. It was so obvious to her that we were meant to be together, that we would be happier together, that everything could easily be resolved.

Unlike the entitled rejectees that Tulathimutte describes, who would rather murder the person who has rejected them than see her go on to be happier with someone else, my friend mostly internalized her rejection. Although there are, of course, women who do not gracefully accept rejection (I personally know more than one person who has been stalked by a disgruntled woman), this type of interpersonal violence does roughly run along gendered lines. Tulathimutte acknowledges that most of this violence is carried out by men but only touches lightly on the question before moving on to an analysis of loneliness. Are men lonelier, you might be left wondering, than women? (In some ways, not in other ways.) Does rejection sting more for them? (In some ways, not in other ways.) Does it therefore stew for longer or take on more grandiose proportions in their imaginations?

Like many things broadly associated with love, I think the long history of rejection narratives that Tulathimutte describes (Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen) has very little to do with romance. Tulathimutte generally makes the same point, but the killers he mentions still come out as disaffected lovers in the end. He stresses that mass shooters tend to have recently experienced romantic disappointment. They experience rejection as total rejection of their selfhood. Pathologically narcissistic and starved for intimacy, they retaliate in spectacular terms. Rejection becomes non-specific in this framing. Shooters like Elliot Rodger did not really murder the women who rejected them, even if they viewed it as a twisted form of closure for past disappointment. They murdered women who had nothing to do with them.

Although this is a structural analysis in the sense that it examines social factors that have likely exacerbated mass shooting or serial killing as specific phenomena, it is not really a structural analysis in the sense that it does not examine the social factors that lead to the prevalence, historically and globally, of femicide. It also does not take into account that men who commit intimate partner violence, who are also more likely to murder their partners after a perceived rejection like a separation attempt, usually have a documented history of physical abuse and aggression. People with a history of violence, in other words, seem to commit violence.

You do not commonly hear “femicide” used as a sociological descriptor in the US - at least not to refer to an American tendency. We do not think of the murder of women in this country as a rash, a structural pattern, a social disease. In other places, such as Mexico or Honduras or India, where femicide is at the forefront of large activist movements, it is often described by international organizations like UN Women or the WHO as positively correlated with religion, poverty, conservative attitudes towards gender, general backwardness, in other words.

In the US, when men murder women - their intimate partners or strangers - it tends to be seen as individualistic. The killers are either portrayed as socially abnormal, mentally unwell, abandoned by a destitute healthcare system and broken social safety net; or conversely, as wronged, undergoing a psychic break known legally as a “crime of passion.”

This set of analytic descriptors has been widely criticized by feminist writers and activists, but although men who murder women are undoubtedly generally motivated by misogyny, calling them “misogynists” seems like an insufficient lexical response. Misogyny is sort of like mental illness in this paradigm: a personal problem. Neither framework leaves open the possibility that anyone is capable of misogynist violence, nor accounts for the possibility that it may be provoked less by something like rejection or loneliness or disappointment and more that it is provoked by perceived transgression of patriarchal norms. If rejection is viewed as a transgression of patriarchal norms, that fundamentally springs from entitlement and not hurt feelings, whatever it may feel like to the person rejected.

“Violent men’s grievances,” writes Alice Bolin in Dead Girls (2018), “are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence […] This shit-eating innocence is so crucial to the fantasy of American masculinity, a bizarre collection of expectations and tropes ‘so paralytically infantile’ as James Baldwin writes in Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood, “that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.” Dead Girls chronicles this American mythos, how tied up it is with fantasies of settler colonial violence and power, the wildness and terror of the “west.” In her analysis of the 2001 crime thriller, Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter, she notes how the male investigators trying to catch a Spokane serial killer of sex workers, are blinded by their preconceptions about the case and about what motivates femicide in general. The FBI investigators are convinced that it all comes back to “fantasy,” and firmly believe that by accessing this kind of fantasy mindset, ostensibly dormant within all men, cops will be able to understand and solve these crimes. The one female detective working on the case is repelled by this idea. “If she couldn’t imagine the fantasy, what could she imagine? The victim. The fear.” Over Tumbled Graves, Bolin writes, “insists that serial killers’ minds are not singular. They’re a dime a dozen.”

In the ballet Giselle, a young peasant girl is courted by a young man named Albrecht. Unbeknownst to Giselle, Albrecht is a duke who is already engaged to a duchess named Bathilde. He doesn’t really intend to marry Giselle - how could he? But he is swept up in romantic fantasy and perhaps also by entitlement, the sense that a peasant girl’s inner life is not quite equal to his own, and he continues to woo her, hiding his true identity. When Giselle finds out that she has been lied to, she either kills herself, or alternatively, has a heart attack and dies.

She is then raised from her grave by a group of vengeful spirits; they are the ghosts of young women jilted, deceived, or betrayed by their lovers. When Albrecht comes to lay flowers on Giselle’s grave, they force him to dance to the death, quite literally. Giselle, who still loves him, and who is still pure of heart despite being a wraith, protects him with the power of her love. At dawn, he goes home, exhausted, and Giselle passes on, freed from an eternity of malicious haunting.

In Giselle, the ghosts are a kind of sisterhood, bonded through a collective thirst for revenge. They understand their experience as an experience of womanhood. Their solution cannot but be collective. Giselle transcends this bent towards violence because she is still in love. Unlike other jilted heroines, Dido, Ophelia, Eponine, Anna Morgan, she is offered a chance to destroy the life of the man who has hurt her. She is elevated from this path of brutality by the power of her love. Both the revenge of the ghostly women and Giselle’s ultimate choice of forgiveness rely on a broader social understanding of how harm happens. The women understand themselves as collective victims; Giselle exonerates Albrecht because she understands on some level how his life has been socially determined. She offers him empathy, in other words. Something the dead generally cannot grant.

What do we gain from attempting this kind of empathy? Literature that probes this kind of masculinity is heralded as brave and exciting. Lonely men, so the idea goes, are so tightly wound up that their interiors have become invisible even to themselves. If they only go to therapy, if they only experience the healing touch of compassion, the love of a woman, maybe they too can become capable of empathy in their own right.

This kind of lenience is conditional. It does not extend to those already deemed brutal, unfeeling, inhuman, designated as the natural perpetrators of femicide. Generally homeless men, Black men, trans women, or others marginalized by society. Nor does it extend to women designated as natural victims, many of whom are experiencing an epidemic of femicide: poor women, trans women, Black women, sex workers, women suffering from addiction or mental illness. For these kinds of social rejection, there is less empathy.

In her 2022 book Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv tells the story of a young Black women named Naomi who has been institutionalized after attempting a murder-suicide of her twin babies. Naomi is 24 and experiencing what is later diagnosed as a schizophrenic episode. She believes that society wants to see her dead and that she and her children are being persecuted. She describes grinding intergenerational poverty and growing up abused and neglected, surrounded by violence and oppressive policing. Aviv reads case notes on her delusions, but concludes that some of them are probably real. Her notion that the world despises and reviles her and her children and that there is no better future for them seems borne out by her lived experience.

What ultimately helps Naomi the most, by her own account, is getting to know the prison library at the criminal psychiatric ward where she is held. The librarian introduces her to Black radical literature and affirms both her experiences of oppression and the scope of her religious worldview. Naomi writes parts of a memoir which Aviv draws upon for her account. Although she intimately understands her own marginalization, she is offered a lexicon through which to explain it. She finds tools with which to describe the world.

What is so unusual about Aviv’s sympathy for Naomi and interest in her inner life is how it is not conditioned by condescension for her mental illness or by horror at her crime. Instead, Aviv recognizes her as neither simply a victim of an oppressive system nor as an aberrant actor. Instead, Naomi is acting in a way that seems rational to her in the context of the life she has been granted. Violence begets violence. Suffering begets suffering.

Why, you might be left wondering, are we so often asked to empathize with those who are already granted so much empathy? Lonely, unhappy, violent men. If these men are also victims of patriarchy, victims of extreme wealth inequality and social deprivation, they also retain some level of agency within that system. If they are rational actors within the framework of their own worldview, it is because their worldview prizes their own faltering dominance. How much empathy is it really rational to have for those who will grant you none of their own? How can you try to look into, to process the inner lives of those who would deny you an inner life? Where does it really get you in the end?