Further Tales from the Reading List: Welcome to the Monkey House
So I feel kind of bad about this, because most all of the other stories in his book are really enjoyable, but I just have to vent on this one.
Did I miss something? Because it sure looks like Billy the Poet is using rape to turn women around to his point of view regarding sex and reproduction.
(That isn't really fair to say like that, the narrative does show the Hostess (I forget her name) as being really upset about it, not enjoying it at all and it being a bad thing in general which deserves a few points, but we're still supposed to agree with his point and how he goes about making it.)
So here's the set up: in the future the world is totally overpopulated and instead of doing something cool like colonizing the moon they decide to implement "ethical" birth control (which makes you dead from the waste down instead of actually blocking conception) and encouraging the use of suicide parlors. An outlaw by the name of Billy the Poet loves to deflower suicide parlor hostesses (who are contractually obligated to be virgins) but afterwards the women can never identify him.
Our story starts with a Hostess named... Nancy (Ah ha!) who gets a poem from Billy and is eventually abducted at gunpoint into the sewers where he... "questions her long standing beliefs" after her pills wear off leaving her with a bottle of "effective" birth control pills and a poem.
Problems I have with this:
- Billy compares his act with that of a Victorian era husband to his wife (his grandfather and grandmother) but it doesnt really work. He doesn't love her, she doesn't love him, he abandons her the next morning, and she had absolutely no say in the matter. Victorian women might have been pressured into marriage but they knew sex and children were part of the marriage deal and they could always... be a nun? Ok, so they didn't have many options, but there was a veneer of choice and affection and the grandfather and grandmother in question did love each other and grew into their future selves together. The poem Billy recycled from his grandfather was supposed to be sweet, but in the end it came off as creepy to me, because it just plain wasn't love.
- She was held down by his followers, including ex-hostesses as she fought back. This is supposed to signify that eventually she would see this is the best thing for women. I guess they didn't have cults back in the 1960's because having female followers doesn't make Jonestown or the Branch Dividians less creepy, and it doesn't make the scene less creepy.
- This is apparently how he gets all of his female followers (at least, the ones we see) but then how does he get the males? Does he rape them too? Does he employ his female followers to seduce them? Or do men just naturally like sex more even when they're exposed to the same conditioning as women? I feel like it's the last option, and though this is really subjective it is a little skeevy.
- He specifically targets a group of women who look similar (all six foot or taller) who work in a powerful position (power over life and death of their guests when most people don't have jobs at all) who are highly educated (requiring degrees in psychology) and who undertook career requiring virginity (like nuns. Nuns of death, but still nuns). And, maybe I watched too much SVU in my formative years, but this sounds much more like the MO a serial rapist or a cult leader then recruiting for a political movement.
-Oh! I almost forgot, at the very end he says something to the effect that someday she'll come to resent him mostly because he was a bad lover and a short little dweeb. Again, I'm not an expert on the subject, but I'd imagine there are bigger things on your mind then how attractive your rapist is.
So how could this story have been written without upsetting my delicate sensibilities? I don't know, but if the character cared more about my special-little-snowflake opinions there are other ways he could go about recruiting people. For example: he could "convert" couples. This would cut down on the unfortunate implications because they were already having sex (over population is still a problem, even after 100 years of these meds, there must be some reproduction going on!) but he's freeing them to enjoy themselves without consequences. Or, other idea, Billy the Poet is just a title passed around as men fall in love with women, woo them, and then convince them to trade pills. This would still be creepy in a Bella and Edward sort of way, but it would still be a step up for me.
So I guess it's just really weird expecting this tale of rejecting antiquated ethics and the sexual/reproductive freedom and getting Victorian era porno logic.
Ok, never mind. Apparently loads of people have issues with Vonnegut. Sadly this does not include my teacher or anyone in my class. In fact he had us defend the author from claims of sexism/misogyny, and my group had no difficulty. I can see where they're coming from, but it's still tough to ignore it all.