“But we kid ourselves if we try to confine either the sexual behavior, or the culture that supports it, to France. Commentators seem to have missed, for example, echoes of the “loudly American” bestselling novel Freedom, in which the main character holds a decades-long grudge against her mother for essentially dispensing the same [rape suppressing] advice as Banone’s under near-identical circumstances.”
There comes a point when something like an “international global conspiracy” (posited by defenders of those like Assange and Strauss-Kuhn) is not a conspiracy but is, rather, the booted heel of the cultural hegemony.
I thought Tkacik’s allusion to Freedom was inspired precisely because it called to my mind the famously European stylings of the American uber-author Thomas Pynchon and his fixation on plots and conspiracies. Pynchon’s best novels taught us that plots are less plots than just the status quo, the structure of life whose threads constrict those not in the know, the proles, the powerless.
