By Mindy McGinnis
Every few days on HBO I would end up finding Emerald Fennell’s A Promising Young Woman and almost against my will, I would be drawn in. It is one of the best films in recent years I’ve ever seen, and truly one of the most terrifying. The latter opinion is one that viewers of both sexes will agree on, though no doubt for radically different reasons.
Carey Mulligan who spent the beginning of her career in wide-eyed ingénue roles is a revelation as Cassandra, a woman whose life and career were permanently destroyed during college when her best friend was raped and the trauma caused her to commit suicide not long after. When we see Cassandra in the opening sequences it’s frightening, but it’s nothing compared to what happens when she finds a goal to focus her energies towards and exact a meticulous and very specific plan of revenge on those who she blames for her friend’s death. I will leave those details for you to discover and instead tell you about the one portion of the movie that is unforgettable.
Halfway through her plan, Cassandra tracks down the attorney who got the charges dismiss. Alfred Molina is always wonderful, but you’ll never forget his performance here. He is alone among Cassandra’s targets not only in the fact that he feels guilty but he seems almost to welcome her appearance. He gives an unforgettable monologue. His firm basically specializes in defending men accuses of sexual assault and worse. He tells her how much easier it is these days then it was when he got started. When he finishes with his matter-of-fact summation, he asks: “Are you going to hurt me?” No excuses, no begging. You get the feeling he sees this as his retribution. For the only time in the film, Cassandra is shaken. She leaves without acting. There’s a brutal man a few blocks away. “Do you want me to hurt him?” he asks her just as matter-of-factly. “No.” she says. You could argue that Cassandra thinks the ideal punishment for this man is for him to spend the rest of his life suffering. But not long after, she tries very sincerely to walk away from not just her revenge, but everything she’s been doing for years. I’ve asked myself every time I watch this sequence: Is Cassandra really trying to move on or has she realized that no matter what she does, she will never balance the scales?
As I write this article, we are approaching the fifth anniversary of the #MeToo movement. I think at this point, it’s time to consider it a failure. Before I get buried under a mountain of hostile comments, what has really changed since it started? Set aside the ludicrous idea that somehow exposing all these powerful men will somehow shame society into changing. (I have long considered the 21st Century, an era of reality shows, social media, and sex tapes, truly the post-shame era.) I care more about things more important than exposure, minor details like justice and punishment. And to that extent, what really has changed? Harvey Weinstein went to prison and so did Bill Cosby…for awhile. I don’t really consider it a victory for anybody when a man who has spent decades in a position of power loses his job, as if somehow the idea of Les Moonves no longer being the head of CBS makes it all right that he spent decades abusing women. And almost all of the major entertainers who have lost their employment have only done so for awhile. Louis C.K. is doing standup again. Kevin Spacey is starting to make movies. Al Franken has a podcast and Bill Maher advocated he run against Trump for President on Real Time two years ago. It’s great to like a hashtag, it costs you nothing. But don’t tell me Chris Noth getting fired from …And Just Like That is some victory for the cause.
No, a victory would be if each one of these powerful men, these celebrities, was locked in a room with all the women they’ve violated or harassed for a week. I know. Not a politically correct thing to say. Not a polite thing to say. Yes, this is bloodthirsty and just as criminal as the action they spent decades doing. But I’m frankly tired of the only captains of industry and political leaders only paying for their crimes on Law and Order: SVU. I know an eye for an eye makes the world blind. Honestly, it’s not the eyes that are the cause of the problem.
And all of these big victories for women only involve the rich and famous. What about the no doubt countless others in the small towns and cities across America who have been doing similar atrocities for decades, the athletic coaches, the doctors, the favorite teachers? Somehow I doubt Selma Hayek and Ashley Judd appearing at the Oscars counts as any kind of victory for those victims.
One last cultural reference before I tie this all together. In the fall of 2016 MTV premiered the dramedy Sweet/Vicious. I still believe it was canceled after one season more because MTV was getting out of the original series business then because of the subject matter, even though it’s hard to imagine it getting traction. The series deals with two freshmen girls at an unnamed college, one of whom is the victim of a sexual assault in the pilot. The two women find each other and start taking revenge on the rapists and assaulters that are in every fraternity. (Mostly they just taser and beat them severely, although there is one murder in the pilot.) The college is very good at sweeping these things under the rug – there’s literally a wall in an abandoned residence that has all the men who’ve assaulted women on this campus. Given what we learned about so many colleges these days, I wouldn’t be shocked if the creators had a real college in mind.
All of these thoughts came together when I finally read Mindy McGinnis’ The Female of the Species this year. Written in the fall of 2016, well before any of the cultural events I discussed previously, it is just as timely now as it was then and, sadly, has probably been for decades, if not since man climbed out of the primordial ooze.
Looking at the cover of the book, which has picture of animal defined by their female name ending with a picture of a woman, you might look at the cover and think you were in for a romp. If the book summary doesn’t disabuse of that notion, you certainly will by the end of the first page, which introduces us to Alex Craft.
Alex is a high school senior, on her way to becoming a valedictorian in a small Ohio town. It’s the kind of town that was trashed by the recession of 2008 and has never recovered. It’s the town where everybody knows each other and has for generations. And while there’s drinking, meth and in one critical case, a pedophile everyone knows, when a violent murder takes place, the town notices it. The victim was Anna, Alex’s older sister.
Alex has known for years that she is broken. Her father was a violent man whose abandonment of his family was considered a better move for them then staying with them. Anna knew something was off with her sister, and kept her in check. When Anna dies, there’s nothing left to hold her back and she ‘becomes vengeance’. In the first chapter, she stalks and kills the man who killed her sister.
Anyone who has read either Jeff Lindsay’s novels or seen the Showtime series will instantly draw the comparison of Alex to Dexter Morgan. The difference is Alex tries as little as possible to engage with the world. Offered a chance to go to college, she tries to pass the opportunity on to the person below her, because she thinks that she needs to stay in this world. “It’s better for other people,” she says at one point.
The novel is told from three perspectives. The first is Alex, who has the bluntest views of everything. The second is Jack Fisher. Jack is the golden boy in high school, second in his class, star basketball athlete, friend to every guy, every girls wants him. He also desperately wants to get the hell of his town, and is so poor that a scholarship is his only way out. He discovered Anna’s body years ago, but has regulated Alex to the background ever since, mostly out of guilt. Now in a series of events, he becomes aware of Alex in a way he never has been, even though he’s known her his whole life.
The third perspective is from Peekay. Peekay is a nickname for ‘Preacher’s Kid’. Peekay seems determined to be anything but that cliché: she can drink as much as the next kid at her high school, and tells us in her first chapter: “I know what a dick smells like.” Adam, her boyfriend more by default than anything else, was stolen earlier by Branley, the high school glamour girl. Peekay learned this because nudes of Branley ended up on Adam’s phone and she saw it. The fact Branley believes just as firm that she’s supposed to be with Jack – and indeed spends as much time in the novel sleeping with Jack even while she and Adam are together - is another one of those things in this high school that everybody knows about and nobody says. Like more high school kids Peekay needs extracurricular activities to look good on her high school transcript. She volunteers at an animal shelter, which is where she meets Alex.
Now that I’ve told you who the three leads are, I will start speaking in generalities about the plot, leaving the specifics for you to discover. Alex has spent her entire teenage life deliberate staying in the background. In different ways, first Peekay, then Jack begin to draw her out. In this town, it means you all drink together in a favorite place, which is a long abandoned church that the town has been using for such a long time for drinks and hookups that at one point Peekay, looking at the graffiti, found her mother’s name there. One night Peekay sees someone she recognized and ends up being roofied. She is saved from a certain rape when Alex takes an action so violent it almost exposes who she is but at the time, seems at an act of true bravery.
Over and over with so many of these allegations of powerful men over the decades has some the refrain from their defenders: “Why did they wait so long to come forward?” McGinnis doesn’t ignore this question. Early in the novel, a local cop holds the kind of assembly we all attended at some point in our lives. Rather then go through the clichés, this cop tells the kids bluntly the truth: If you get drunk or do drug, you will be assaulted or raped. And you will know your attacker. The assembly scares all of these kids senseless – and then the next day, they’re all drinking at the church. The day after the assault, Peekay is a raw nerve and will be traumatized for weeks afterwards, but rather then call the cops or even tell her parents, she says nothing. Part of is the trauma and shame, but also there’s the fact that if she tells an adult, she’ll have to tell them where she was and what she was doing. In my opinion, this has less to do with shame or fear and rather that given the option; it’s easier for everybody to do nothing if something horrible happens, even if it affects you.
While the three narrators are drawn by far the sharpest, none of the characters is left as a cliché. Branley might come across as the high school slut, certainly many of the characters, like Peekay, think of her that way. But in a critical scene near the end of the novel, Branley finds herself toppling off the top of the pecking order she has spent high school on. In a moment fueled by alcohol, she says her actions are based on one thing: her looks are all she thinks she has. She has maybe ten, fifteen years of being everybody’s first choice and then she won’t be able to compete with deeper, more measured women who both look good and have depths to them – like Alex. This revelation will come as a duel tragedy, both because she confides to the wrong person and that this person doesn’t think to tell her she’s wrong until it’s too late.
Yes, there is violence is this novel, none of it graphic except to the people who see it, and there is death. But the larger story of Female of the Species is one of a tragedy, and we are surprised that Alex is much a tragic figure as the other two characters in this novel. In reading a description of Dexter, I learned that the writers never believed it was the monster in Dexter Morgan that was his flaw; it was when he tried to embrace his human side that true tragedy ensued. Alex has accepted her monster at an early age, and at one point in the novel when she embraces at a critical juncture, the aftermath is horrific because by now her human side has become more prevalent.
Alex Craft is fundamentally broken – she knows that better than anyone. But the world she lives in – which is a microcosm of the world we live in – is broken far worse than she is, right down to a high school boy doing something truly horrendous to a basketball in a crowded gym that everyone else ignores but Alex can never look away from. Like Cassandra in A Promising Young Woman, Alex thinks that her only purpose is to correct that wrong and by the time she finds out that there may be more to it than that, the actions of all three leads have forced her into a position that is truly heartbreaking.
I leave you with a final thought. The title of the book is from a quote by Rudyard Kipling, which is printed on the back cover and never said by anyone in the novel. Kipling has fallen out of favor the last few years, and this quote is no different – it’s even more misogynistic than it was at the time. I think McGinnis chose The Female of the Species as her title deliberately. In the world that all women must live in, mustn’t woman being stronger to survive? The morality police and the real ones will and must call Alex Craft a monster. But after everything we see in this novel, it’s really hard to consider her actions unjustified. The denouement shows in small and not so small ways, that Alex’s action did make a difference and not entirely for the wrong reasons.
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