This is how you lose her

How do you read a book narrated by a misogynistic tool, but written by a man who says things like "What is the role of a male artist in the feminist struggle? We can’t be feminists, I think. Our privilege prevents us. We can be feminist-aligned in some way. And so the women kept saying to us dudes, the best thing you can do is draw maps of masculine privilege. You can go places we can’t. Draw maps so when we drop the bombs, they land accurate.”

Yunior is Junot Diaz's literary avatar. He's swaggered through three of his books now, through Dominican barrios, New Jersey ghettos, New England academia, and in This Is How You Lose Her, what Yunior might call the fierce terrain of the female body. Lose Her's mostly about Yunior's relationships with women, all of which end, and most of which end badly because of Yunior. This is how YOU lose her, after all. He's an indelible character, amazingly articulate, poetic even, astride the ramparts of male chauvinism. Most men like him would call a woman a bitch and call it a day. But Yunior's sexism has verve and beauty. Diaz's drawn a "map of masculine privilege," but it's gorgeous!

Alright, Yunior gets really really sad at the very end of the book because he's been a shithead for so long. His body straight up falls apart on him, like some biblical plague. THIS IS A MAN SUFFERING FOR HIS SINS! NOT A TRIUMPHANT MALE CHAUVINIST!

But why'd we get Yunior in the first place? The thing is, he's a super interesting person except for the way he relates to women. This guy's spectacularly stereotypical behavior (cheats with 50 women in 6 years!) leave no room for female agency and depth, for anything but flat, stereotypical female hysteria. Women are too busy REACINTG to his epically manly exploits to be people themselves. I mean, why a guy who wrote: "Only a bitch of color comes to Harvard to get pregnant. White women don't do that. Asian women don't do that. Only fucking black and Latina women. Why go to all the trouble to get into Harvard just to get knocked up? You could have stayed on the block and done that shit." (198) Why the ivory tower of surpassing machismo and bigotry?

It's super important to explore in depth the embodiments of hegemonic shittiness. They're human too, and one needs to diagnose them to change things. But this book is glorious! You laugh out loud reading it and you don't want it to end. You want to live in Yunior's profoundly fucked head a little longer. And that's a problem! The same way Marlon Brando was too magnetic to play Stanley Kowalski, Diaz is just too fabulously great to voice Yunior.

I think Diaz feels bad about all this. The one chapter told by a woman, Yasmin, is fascinating and beautiful and deeply felt. She works in the laundry room at a hospital and the descriptions of the sheets she's got to clean are astoundingly evocative. Tonally, it's nothing whatever like the rest of the book. It's quiet and reactive, it's observant in the parts where Yunior would be telling YOU how it is. It's one perspective on being a woman in a culture of bellowing masculinity, and it's great. Lose Her needed more of that, or less of Yunior. If you meet your third asshole of the day, it's you. And if you meet your fifth raging pillar of monogamy and tradition, a person defined by their relationship to sex, you're the problem. Sexism is a self fulfilling prophecy, and too much of it comes true here.