40 pages • 1 hour read
Tom PerrottaMrs. Fletcher
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impact of Pornography on Desire and Sexual Behavior
The characters in the novel find their desires and sexual behavior influenced by online pornography, which a sex educator at Brendan’s former school describes as “an unregulated cesspool of degrading images and extreme sexual perversion available to everyone in the privacy of their bedrooms, regardless of their age or emotional maturity” (9). The main characters’ interactions with pornography shape their storylines; Brendan is eventually punished and taught a lesson because of his misappropriation of what he has copied from pornography, while Eve uses pornography as a means of sexual exploration, both virtually and in the real world.
The reader never sees Brendan watching pornography in real time. Significantly, his internet browser is scrubbed of his browsing history, which means that the exact type of material he consumes remains unspecified. However, the degrading, misogynist phrases he uses during sexual activity imply that the pornography he consumes objectifies and demeans women. Perrotta’s non-specification of Brendan’s pornography choices is a device that heightens the sense of ominousness regarding Brendan’s private pursuits. Brendan’s recourse to sexually domineering tactics enables him to manage the vulnerability and lack of control that he feels when he is about to engage in a sexual encounter. He remembers how the first time he had sex with Bella his “hands were literally shaking when [he] put on the condom” (176).
However, when he is about to have sex with Amber, who is influenced by pornography culture, he feels strangely absent from the situation because his mind uncontrollably jumps back to Zack’s dismissal of him at the party. The only way that he can “get [his] head in the game” with Amber is by thinking back to his “going-away present” from Becca and repeating the same demeaning phrases (179). Rather than engaging with his partner, Brendan sees good sex as a venture he is driving, as he goes from “zero to sixty in a couple of seconds, and there was no stopping after that” (180). The influence of macho pornography is seen in his objectification of women and in his illusion of control during sex and his inability to factor in random elements when he is engaged in sexual activity.
Eve’s history with pornography is more transparent than Brendan’s. During her marriage to Ted, she dismissed pornography as ridiculous and tacky. However, when Eve receives the anonymous text message describing her as a MILF, a term from pornography that fantasizes about lust-worthy women of maternal age, she decides to enter milfateria.com online and finds a diverse range of women engaged in numerous types of sexual activity. When Eve realizes that she has no choice about whether she is a MILF or not, “because a MILF was in the eye of the beholder” (59), she decides to own the label and sets out to try different sexual possibilities.
Soon, all potential sexual encounters open to Eve have a pornographic air to them. For example, when Jim Hobie serves her a cocktail at the Lamplighter Inn, she makes a cast of “the handsome bartender, the lonely divorcée” and “could see the video in her head, shot a little shakily from the man’s point of view, the MILF looking up, licking her lips in anticipation as she undid his belt. It was an image that would have been unthinkable at any other time in her life, but now seemed weirdly plausible” (92). Eve’s watching of pornography makes her feel that the ordinary boundaries between human beings have been dissolved and that the world is a bigger and more sexual place than she anticipated. Eve’s pornography-influenced, libidinous imagination eventually finds the bartender/divorcée option a cliché, as she instead opts for a lesbian encounter, threesome, and sexual flirtation with a man her son’s age.
However, while the pornography she consumes does not show the real-life consequences of sexual engagement with colleagues and barely legal men, Eve must address these. Eve as the confident older woman to Amanda’s nervous ingenue, a scenario adapted from MILF pornography, causes workplace friction and eventually forces Amanda’s resignation; meanwhile, Eve’s dangling of the possibility of sex before vulnerable, depressive Julian could have had disastrous consequences, both for Eve’s reputation and Julian’s mental health. Nevertheless, with a stroke of luck and a plot twist that shows Amanda and Julian hooking up with each other once Eve is out of their lives, Eve is spared the worst consequences of her actions.
The novel presents pornography as a pervasive part of contemporary sex, given the influence that it even has over supporting characters—such as George who binges on pornography while his wife is dying and indulges the MILF fantasy, and Amber and Becca who automatically reward undeserving Brendan with oral sex. The characters collectively must learn to differentiate between the onscreen fantasies they have consumed and the emotional messiness of real sexual relationships.
Reinforcing and Challenging White Male Privilege
The novel shows how privileged white males, such as Ted, Brendan, Zack, and Wade—Brendan’s high school friend who mistreats his girlfriend and then exacts disproportionate revenge on Julian when he defends her—get away with misdemeanors and remain unchallenged by society at large. Amber defines this type of privilege as “the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you’re a good person” (167-68), a statement that explains how athletic, middle-class, white males are exonerated from their crimes because they have the traditional appearance of power. Over the course of the novel, some of the privileged are found undeserving and stripped of their former advantages, as the characters make an effort to redress the status quo.
Brendan is initially the recipient of society’s positivity discrimination, as he presents himself as a “big, friendly, fun-loving bro, a dude you’d totally want on your team or in your frat—and the world seemed happy to take him at his word” (12). While Eve can see that Brendan has trained himself to become less sensitive and respectful since his father’s departure and has copied his father in being “a master of denial and evasion” (10), a phrase that denotes how he refuses to be accountable for his actions, she allows him to get away with it. While Eve’s permissive attitude stems from her guilt surrounding the divorce, the world’s view of Brendan as an “impressive young man” (11) stems from its admiration of his superficial traits and the entitlement that goes along with being the bearer of such qualities.
However, when Brendan enters college, a more diverse institution than his old high school, where bro-culture exists alongside cultures that seek to challenge it, he finds that his expectations of social and sexual entitlement are confounded. From the outset, his academic advisor informs him about sexual consent, negating any illusion of exception that Brendan may harbor. His later experience with Amber and subsequent public humiliation reinforce the message that he is just as accountable as everyone else for his actions. When Brendan looks at Cat’s shabbily-rendered portrait on the “Call-Out Wall” for “behavior that damages our community and threatens our safety” (206), he is astounded to find that his face is amongst those of other, largely male criminals. From this turning point, Brendan learns that he must be accountable for his behavior and that like everyone else, he will be judged for his actions.
Brendan’s friendship with Zack is initially based on their mutual privilege, and they delight in trash-talking about those less privileged, whether women, who they judge according to how well they conform to beauty stereotypes, or people of color like Sanjay, whose ambitions and nerdy appearance they disparage. The fact that much of this bonding happens when Brendan and Zack are getting drunk or stoned highlights their attitude of willing obliviousness to their privilege and social responsibility. However, when Zack falls for Lexa, a girl who uses a wheelchair and does not fit the ableist beauty stereotype, he begins to avoid Brendan.
When Brendan challenges Zack on this point, saying, “I would never make fun of a disabled person” (202), thereby pointing out his own morality, Zack believes this is irrelevant. Zack states that he specifically does not “want to be that guy” (202) that he is with Brendan, implying that it is the dynamic between them that is toxic, rather than either individual. Zack is shown to have a point, as both privileged young men are at their crude worst when they are together and become more interesting and kindhearted when they interact with people who are not as privileged.
While privileged Brendan and Zack are cut down to size by the end of the novel, some traditional holders of status remain unaccountable for their actions. Brendan’s father, Ted, who “abandoned a perfectly good family to start over with a woman he’d met through the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist” (11) and caused emotional scarring in both Eve and Brendan, is never brought to justice. Brendan continues to idolize Ted as the parent who is less critical of his ways, while Ted is afforded the opportunity to lavish his paternal instincts on his autistic second son, Jon-Jon, and gains the veneer of being an excellent parent in this endeavor. Similarly, another crime that is not brought to justice is that perpetrated by Brendan and his friends on Julian. Although Julian struggled to get out of bed for a year and delayed his college entry because of the incident, the perpetrators are never explicitly punished. These anomalies in Perrotta’s narrative of increased accountability for the privileged give the impression that true equality is a work in progress.
Diverse Bodies and Outdated Institutions
Primary and supporting characters are forced to interact in institutions that reflect outdated student bodies, gender norms, or family structures. Whereas institutions like Brendan’s college and Eve’s Senior Center were initially envisioned for white, middle-class people from nuclear families, the current users include divorcés, people of color, and those who occupy various points on the gender and sexuality spectrum.
At Brendan’s college drop-off, Eve is disadvantaged as a single mother: She cannot accompany her child into the room because she does not have a male partner to take care of parking the car. She realizes that an anonymous “everyone” tended to “agree that this was the proper division of labor—the men parked the cars while the women stayed with their kids” (13). Given that the moving assistants insist that the vehicle needs to be parked, Eve needs to take on the assigned male role and misses out on the maternal occupation that she feels as entitled to as the mothers who stayed married. While the college’s division of labor is ostensibly pragmatic, Eve feels snubbed and partially blames the system when she misses out on saying a tender goodbye to Brendan, because he enters “full-tilt male bonding mode” (14) with Zack.
Being a woman and a mother, Eve is excluded from the bonding and leaves campus feeling “old and excluded, as if everyone else was going to a party to which she hadn’t been invited” (16). Eve, who would like to be back in education herself and resents being excluded from the college atmosphere because of her age, relishes the more inclusive atmosphere of Eastern Community College, where there were “a number of ‘nontraditional students’ like herself” (49). Although the community college is less prestigious than an actual university, and both Julian and Brendan see it as beneath them, its lower cost and flexible schedule accommodates those who do not fit the privileged teen student stereotype. In offering Margo’s Gender and Society class, the community college proves progressive in offering elections that encourage its students to think outside of everything they have already learned.
While Haddington’s community college is somewhat successful in opening students’ minds, the elderly attendees of its Senior Center have already made up their minds about the world and only want to be confronted with people and topics that fit their established views. Amanda, with her Cleopatra bangs and “multiple lurid tattoos,” is met with “disparaging comments and disgusted head shakes” from the seniors (35). While Amanda flaunts her tattoos and is disgusted with the way “a lot of old white people acted like it was still 1956, like they could say whatever they wanted and not have to take any responsibility for their words” (69), Eve and society in general believe that they have to make exceptions for the senior citizens’ age and different life experiences. In doing so, they reinforce their conservatism.
When Amanda persuades Eve to invite Margo, a transgender woman, to give a lecture that will challenge the senior citizens’ long-held beliefs, it is with the view that “older people were a vulnerable and often stigmatized part of the community, and that it was both morally wrong and politically counterproductive to write them off as a lost cause” (194). While Eve’s reasoning is sound, the response to Margo’s lecture is devastatingly predictable: Margo finds herself mocked and derided by those of her mother’s generation, in exactly the same way that her mother told her to stop the cross-dressing “nonsense” when she was a child. Perrotta shows the attendees of the Senior Center as beyond progressive influence, when avant-garde Amanda leaves to seek “new challenges more commensurate with her exceptional abilities, opportunities the Senior Centre regrettably couldn’t provide” (232), and her successor returns to booking talks on uncontroversial themes, such as maple syrup.
Overall, Perrotta shows that while some institutions, such as the community college, challenge the status-quo, there is still much scope for progress in others. While the dismissal of privileged, white senior citizens’ abilities to open their minds and embrace diversity is damning, it is also realistic, as Perrotta shows that in a revolution of progressive ideas, some people will inevitably be left behind. Nevertheless, Amanda’s ambitions for the conservative seniors are acknowledged and praised by Eve, which implies that the challenge to open senior citizens’ minds should not be given up.
