(1) In Ocean’s Eleven (George Clooney version):
Danny: Does he make you laugh?
Tess: He doesn’t make me cry, Danny.
Oh, this is just pure pussy bait! (*) When they were together, he made her laugh and he made her cry. So two items here: One is, emotional roller coaster. Chick crack. The other is that he’s an asshole. We don’t know why he made her cry— I’m guessing by cheating on her— but it’s enough that he did. He’s no good! He doesn’t care for her! Her treats her badly! You can just see that one line setting off the Bad Boy Alert for the women in the audience, and having them leaving wet spots on their seats. Very deftly done: Two terse lines of dialogue. That’s all that the chicks in the audience need to get that there’s some sort of soap-opera-y relationship backstory.
* I was going to write “pussy crack,” but that would’ve pulled up the wrong mental image.
(2) Random red pill item: Actor Larry Hagman said he rarely got any female fan mail when he played a nice guy on I Dream of Genie, but got tons when he played the total bastard J.R. on Dallas.
(Those two characters were so different that I never even realized they were the same actor until I read that quote.)
(3) Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, a trilogy I strongly recommend if you like Stephenson. It’s the most “Neal Stephenson” of his works that I’ve read, i.e. stylistically dense but always intelligent and funny.
Page 374 et seq.: In 1683 a “vagabond”— that is, a roaming criminal adventurer— named Jack is wandering around in the chaos of the siege of Vienna. In a Turkish officer’s tent he happens upon a young English woman, Eliza; she’d been captured at sea as a child. After some back and forth:
“You talk like a girl who is in need of a spanking.”
“Books of India,” she said coolly, “have entire chapters about that.”
Jack prefers not to get bogged down with companions unless they can help out in a fight, but eventually agrees to let her travel with him. But he warns her:
“If we make it as far as Paris… and if you’ve given me so much as a blink of trouble—one cross look, one wifely crossing of the arms—cutting thespian-like asides, delivered to an imaginary audience—”
“Have you had many women, Jack?”
“—pretending to be shocked by what’s perfectly normal—calculated moods—slowness to get underway—murky complaints about female trouble—”
“Now that you mention it, Jack, this is my time of the month…”
“Not funny at all. Do I look amused?”
Stephenson provides a good list of some standard shit tests here.
And on page 389, on one-itis:
Eliza seemed impressed. Jack was gratified by this—a bad sign. No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification was making favorable impressions on some particular woman.
Later in their adventures Jack gets outrageously beta— like, after Eliza harpoons him to a mast (long story) and he is still in luuuuurv with her— so this is definitely not an unqualified endorsement of Stephenson on women. But he does display flashes of insight here and there.
(4) In Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist, some conversation among Leggy Starlitz, his daughter Zeta, and Viktor, a minor criminal. Starlitz is a gray-market hustler who’s always working some semi-legal scam. His daughter Zeta, 11, has been raised by her mother and her mother’s lesbian lover until a crisis forces them to hand Zeta over to Starlitz. She’s been with him about a week, as he drags her around on various pieces of semi-underworld business. In Istanbul one of Starlitz’s contacts is a young Russian man named Viktor. The three of them are at a cafe and Viktor steps away for a moment:
“Dad, is Viktor a nice guy?”
“No.”
“I knew that,” said Zeta triumphantly. “I just knew it. I mean, I get it about Viktor now. Viktor is the guy that Mom One and Mom Two never wanted me to meet. Right?”
“Right… He’s every mother’s nightmare.”
Gah! Bad move, Starlitz! Should have downplayed Viktor’s Bad Boy cred so that your daughter finds him boring. Don’t confirm the “dangerous bad boy” thing, for fuck’s sake! The correct response is something like, “He tries to be a criminal tough guy, but just can’t swing it. He’s always getting beaten up and outwitted by the real criminals.” Something like that.
Zeta put her elbows on the table. “Dad, can I tell you something? Viktor is just the coolest guy, Dad. Viktor Bilibin is just the coolest, dreamiest, gangster guy. He has such amazing eyes. They look like my pet snake’s.” (LOL.)
Starlitz considered this artless confession. At first glance this was a very alarming development, but she wasn’t his own child for nothing. “You don’t need Viktor,” Starlitz informed her…
Viktor rejoins them. He and Starlitz usually speak in Russian, which Zeta doesn’t know, but she has an uncanny ability to suss out the gist of their conversations. Viktor tells Starlitz in Russian,
“Mehmet Ozbey is dead.”
Starlitz laughed. “I saw Ozbey last night.”
Viktor went pale. “I know he’s dead. I had Ozbey hit,” he insisted. “Nobody could have survived that.”
“Dad,” Zeta said thoughfully, “did Viktor kill somebody?”
“No.”
“He thinks he killed somebody.”
“There’s a big difference.”
Viktor lifted his right hand with two fingers outstretched and his thumb as a revolver hammer. “I killed somebody,” he told her in English, his voice resonant and spooky. “He wanted to kill me, because I know too much. He put me on his hit list. So, I took revenge on him. I had him liquidated. Boom-boom-bang.”
“Wow,” Zeta marveled, eyes like saucers and goose bumps all over her arms. “That’s so corrupt!”
“It was the naked justice of the steets,” Viktor intoned.
“He’s full of it,” Starlitz said.
Much better response.
(5) This wouldn’t normally be categorized as fiction, but I don’t know where else to put it. I’m flipping through this book that my woman has from college: Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, edited by two chicks. I randomly open it to page 77 and start skimming. On page 78 we get this:
Tactile sensations play an important part in Beatrice’s visions: She feels God’s presence passing through her whole body; the Lord pierces her soul with the fire of His love, as with the point of a flamboyant sword, drawing her heart to His. The blood of Christ’s wounds flows into her soul.
As I’ve noted before, women are always being penetrated by men in female-authored material. Interestingly, this happens a lot more than male explorers thrust themselves forcefully into receptive virgin lands or whatever, in material written by men.
(Thus when this crazy bitch claimed that the desire to settle space is just men’s desire to grab the asteroid belt by the pussy or whatever, I think that, aside from garden-variety insanity, she was projecting.)
Index page for my Red Pill in Fiction posts:
https://neurotoxinweb.wordpress.com/red-pill-in-fiction/
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